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Benford's law is frequently used to evaluate the likihood that data is misrepresentative. Typically statistical tests measure the likihood. Another method of employing Benford's law is to compare the frequency of leading digits to the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-01-28 Aaron Carl Smith

The uneven distribution of digits in numerical data, known as Benford's law, was discovered in 1881. Since then, this law has been shown to be correct in copious numerical data relating to economics, physics and even prime numbers. Although…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2009-07-28 Oded Kafri

Benford's Law states that the frequency of first digits of numbers in naturally occurring systems is not evenly distributed. Numbers beginning with a 1 occur roughly 30\% of the time, and are six times more common than numbers beginning…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2016-02-17 Jennifer Golbeck

Nature and our world have a bias! Roughly $30\%$ of the time the number $1$ occurs as the leading digit in many datasets base $10$. This phenomenon is known as Benford's law and it arrises in diverse fields such as the stock market,…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-08-16 Irfan Durmić , Steven J. Miller

The occurrence of digits 1 through 9 as the leftmost nonzero digit of numbers from real-world sources is distributed unevenly according to an empirical law, known as Benford's law or the first digit law. It remains obscure why a variety of…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2019-05-02 Mingshu Cong , Congqiao Li , Bo-Qiang Ma

The Newcomb-Benford Law, which is also called the first digit phenomenon, has applications in diverse phenomena ranging from social and computer networks, engineering systems, natural sciences, and accounting. In forensics, it has been used…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-06-19 Subhash Kak

Fix a base B and let zeta have the standard exponential distribution; the distribution of digits of zeta base B is known to be very close to Benford's Law. If there exists a C such that the distribution of digits of C times the elements of…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-11-16 Steven J. Miller , Mark. J. Nigrini

In many real life situations, it is observed that the first digits (i.e., $1,2,\ldots,9$) of a numerical data-set, which is expressed using decimal system, do not follow a random distribution. Instead, smaller numbers are favoured by nature…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2022-06-10 Abhishek Shukla , Ankit Kumar Pandey , Anirban Pathak

Infrared spectra of various polymers were treated statistically. It was established that for the absorbance spectra the Benford distribution of leading digits takes place, whereas the distribution of leading digits for transmittance spectra…

General Physics · Physics 2015-06-10 Ed. Bormashenko , E. Shulzinger , G. Whyman , Ye. Bormashenko

Benford's law is the statement that in many real-world data sets, the probability of having digit \(d\) in base \(B\), where \(1 \leq d \leq B\), as the first digit is \(\log_{B}\left(\tfrac{d+1}{d}\right)\). We sometimes refer to this as…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Bruce Fang , Ava Irons , Ella Lippelman , Steven J. Miller

Benford's law is widely used for fraud-detection nowadays. The underlying assumption for using the law is that a "regular" dataset follows the significant digit phenomenon. In this paper, we address the scenario where a shrewd fraudster…

Applications · Statistics 2021-05-21 Javad Kazemitabar

Benford's Law predicts that the first significant digit on the leftmost side of numbers in real-life data is proportioned between all possible 1 to 9 digits approximately as in LOG(1 + 1/digit), so that low digits occur much more frequently…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-01-03 Alex Ely Kossovsky

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet they frequently fail on basic numerical problems, producing incorrect outputs. Inspired by Benford's Law, a statistical pattern in which lower…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Jiandong Shao , Yao Lu , Jianfei Yang

Prime numbers seem to distribute among the natural numbers with no other law than that of chance, however its global distribution presents a quite remarkable smoothness. Such interplay between randomness and regularity has motivated sci-…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2008-11-21 Bartolo Luque , Lucas Lacasa

It is well-known that sequences such as the Fibonacci numbers and the factorials satisfy Benford's Law, that is, leading digits in these sequences occur with frequencies given by $P(d)=\log_{10}(1+1/d)$, $d=1,2,\dots,9$. In this paper, we…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2021-08-10 Zhaodong Cai , A. J. Hildebrand , Junxian Li

Benford's Law describes the prevalence of small numbers as the leading digits of numbers in many sets of integers. We prove a variant of Benford's law for many positive-density subsets of the primes. This follows from a more general result…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2022-07-18 Henry Glunz

One of the main challenges in Biophysics teaching consists on how to motivate students to appreciate the beauty of theoretical formulations. This is crucial when the system modeling requires numerical calculations to achieve realistic…

Biological Physics · Physics 2018-05-14 A J da Silva , S Floquet , R F Lima

We explain Kossovsky's generalization of Benford's law which is a formula that approximates the distribution of leftmost digits in finite sequences of natural data and apply it to six sequences of data including populations of US cities and…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-08-16 Alex E. Kossovsky , Wayne M. Lawton

The occurrence of the nonzero leftmost digit, i.e., 1, 2, ..., 9, of numbers from many real world sources is not uniformly distributed as one might naively expect, but instead, the nature favors smaller ones according to a logarithmic…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2014-11-21 Lijing Shao , Bo-Qiang Ma

Benford's law states that in data sets from different phenomena leading digits tend to be distributed logarithmically such that the numbers beginning with smaller digits occur more often than those with larger ones. Particularly, the law is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-01-12 Tariq Ahmad Mir