Related papers: Data science for assessing possible tax income man…
The yearly aggregated tax income data of all, more than 8000, Italian municipalities are analyzed for a period of five years, from 2007 to 2011, to search for conformity or not with Benford's law, a counter-intuitive phenomenon observed in…
The paper contains a short review of techniques examining regional wealth inequalities based on recently published research work but is also presenting unpublished features. The data pertains to Italy (IT), over the period 2007-2011: the…
This paper discusses region wealth size distributions, through their member cities aggregated tax income. As an illustration, the official data of the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance has been considered, for all Italian…
This dataset contains the annual aggregated income taxes of all the Italian municipalities over the years 2007-2011. Data are clustered over the Italian regions and provinces. The source of the data is the Italian Ministry of Economics and…
This paper discusses the size distribution, - in economic terms - of the Italian municipalities over the period 2007-2011. Yearly data are rather well fitted by a modified Lavalette law, while Zipf-Mandelbrot-Pareto law seems to fail in…
We discuss a common suspicion about reported financial data, in 10 industrial sectors of the 6 so called "main developing countries" over the time interval [2000-2014]. These data are examined through Benford's law first significant digit…
The reproducibility of academic research has long been a persistent issue, contradicting one of the fundamental principles of science. What is even more concerning is the increasing number of false claims found in academic manuscripts…
We address the task of identifying anomalous observations by analyzing digits under the lens of Benford's law. Motivated by the crucial objective of providing reliable statistical analysis of customs declarations, we answer one major and…
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…
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…
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…
We investigate the shape of the Italian personal income distribution using microdata from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth, made publicly available by the Bank of Italy for the years 1977--2002. We find that the upper tail of the…
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,…
Many systems exhibit a digit bias. For example, the first digit base 10 of the Fibonacci numbers, or of $2^n$, equals 1 not 10% or 11% of the time, as one would expect if all digits were equally likely, but about 30% of the time. This…
Match-fixing undermines the integrity of sport by eroding public trust and threatening the financial sustainability of clubs and leagues. The global expansion of sports betting markets has created new incentives and opportunities for…
Benford's law describes the distribution of the first digit of numbers appearing in a wide variety of numerical data, including tax records, and election outcomes, and has been used to raise "red flags" about potential anomalies in the data…
The rapid deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains, including those classified as high-risk under the The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has intensified the need for reliable compliance auditing. For binary classifiers,…
We study the structure of a social network of strong ties (trust network) investigating its property of connectedness versus fragmentation. To this purpose we analyse an extensive set of census data, about marrying or having children with…
We use the Newcomb-Benford law to test if countries have manipulated reported data during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that democratic countries, countries with the higher gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, higher healthcare…
Using firm-level data collected by Statistics Italy for 2008, 2011, and 2015, we examine the Triple-Helix synergy among geographical and size distributions of firms, and the NACE codes attributed to these firms, at the different levels of…