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Related papers: Variations on the Newcomb-Benford Law

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Considering the first significant digits (noted d) in data sets of dissipation for turbulent flows, the probability to find a given number (d=1 or 2 or... 9) would be 1/9 for an uniform distribution. Instead the probability closely follows…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2015-11-18 Damien Biau

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

Benford's Law is an empirical law which predicts the frequency of significant digits in databases corresponding to various phenomena, natural or artificial. Although counter intuitive at the first sight, it predicts a higher occurrence of…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2014-06-30 Gaurav Bhole , Abhishek Shukla , T. S. Mahesh

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 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…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Tianyi Chen , Charalampos E. Tsourakakis

Benford's law is an empirical ``law'' governing the frequency of leading digits in numerical data sets. Surprisingly, for mathematical sequences the predictions derived from it can be uncannily accurate. For example, among the first billion…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-04-28 Zhaodong Cai , Matthew Faust , A. J. Hildebrand , Junxian Li , Yuan Zhang

The diverse applications of the Benford law attract investigators working in various fields of physics, biology and sociology. At the same time, the groundings of the Benford law remain obscure. Our paper demonstrates that the Benford law…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-11-19 G. Whyman , E. Shulzinger , Ed. Bormashenko

We show that the frequency distribution of the first significant digits of the numbers in the data sets generated from a large class of measures of quantum correlations, which are either entanglement measures, or belong to the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-07-28 Titas Chanda , Tamoghna Das , Debasis Sadhukhan , Amit Kumar Pal , Aditi Sen De , Ujjwal Sen

A century ago, it was predicted that the first significant digit appearing in a data would be nonuniformly distributed, with the number one appearing with the highest frequency. This law goes by the name of Benford's law. It holds for data…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2011-10-07 Aditi Sen De , Ujjwal Sen

The first digit law, also known as Benford's law or the significant digit law, is an empirical phenomenon that the leading digit of numbers from real world sources favors small ones in a form $\log(1+{1}/{d})$, where $d=1, 2, ..., 9$. Such…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2019-08-14 Mingshu Cong , Bo-Qiang Ma

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

Out-of-distribution data and anomalous inputs are vulnerabilities of machine learning systems today, often causing systems to make incorrect predictions. The diverse range of data on which these models are used makes detecting atypical…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Laura O'Mahony , David JP O'Sullivan , Nikola S. Nikolov

The invariance of Benford-Newcomb law under base changing is employed to test whether or not some data follow such distribution. Taking into account the Brazilian senate election in 1994, changes in the numerical base were able to evidence…

Applications · Statistics 2022-10-19 Eduardo Gueron , Jeronimo Pellegrini

We show how Benford's Law (BL) for first, second, ..., digits, emerges from the distribution of digits of numbers of the type $a^{R}$, with $a$ any real positive number and $R$ a set of real numbers uniformly distributed in an interval $[…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-09-22 Victor Romero-Rochin

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

Probability · Mathematics 2026-03-06 Bruce Fang , Steven J. Miller

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-14 Lucio Barabesi , Andrea Cerioli , Andrea Cerasa , Domenico Perrotta

Benford's law, or the law of the first significant digit, has been subjected to numerous studies due to its unique applications in financial fields, especially accounting and auditing. However, studies that addressed the law's establishment…

General Economics · Economics 2025-01-07 M. R. Sarkandiz

The intriguing law of anomalous numbers, also named Benford's law, states that the significant digits of data follow a logarithmic distribution favoring the smallest values. In this work, we test the compliance with this law of the atomic…

Atomic Physics · Physics 2024-05-30 Jean-Christophe Pain , Yuri Ralchenko

Nonextensive statistics, characterized by a nonextensive parameter $q$, is a promising and practically useful generalization of the Boltzmann statistics to describe power-law behaviors from physical and social observations. We here explore…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2011-03-07 Lijing Shao , Bo-Qiang Ma

In this paper, we will see that the proportion of d as leading digit, d $\in$ 1, 9, in data (obtained thanks to the hereunder developed model) is more likely to follow a law whose probability distribution is determined by a specific upper…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-06-13 Stéphane Blondeau da Silva