Related papers: First digit law from Laplace transform
According to Benford's Law, many data sets have a bias towards lower leading digits (about $30\%$ are $1$'s). The applications of Benford's Law vary: from detecting tax, voter and image fraud to determining the possibility of match-fixing…
In the literature, Benford's Law is considered for base-b expansions where b>1 is an integer. In this paper, we investigate the distribution of leading "digits" of a sequence of positive integers under other expansions such as Zeckendorf…
We study the individual digits for the absolute value of the characteristic polynomial for the Circular $\beta$-Ensemble. We show that, in the large $N$ limit, the first digits obey Benford's Law and the further digits become uniformly…
Benford's law states that for many random variables X > 0 its leading digit D = D(X) satisfies approximately the equation P(D = d) = log_{10}(1 + 1/d) for d = 1,2,...,9. This phenomenon follows from another, maybe more intuitive fact,…
Benford's law is an empirical observation, first reported by Simon Newcomb in 1881 and then independently by Frank Benford in 1938: the first significant digits of numbers in large data are often distributed according to a logarithmically…
Benford's law states that many data sets have a bias towards lower leading digits (about $30\%$ are 1s). There are numerous applications, from designing efficient computers to detecting tax, voter and image fraud. It's important to know…
The following work is written in easy language for college level students. It shows how the first digit probabilities of a group of continuous real-valued functions can be calculated. Thus, examples explaining how the probabilities are…
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…
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 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…
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…
We show the leading digits of a variety of systems satisfying certain conditions follow Benford's Law. For each system proving this involves two main ingredients. One is a structure theorem of the limiting distribution, specific to the…
We provide conditions on dependent and on non-stationary random variables $X_n$ ensuring that the mantissa of the sequence of products $\left(\prod_{1}^{n}X_k\right)$ is almost surely distributed following the Benford's law or converges in…
The so-called Benford's laws are of frequent use in order to observe anomalies and regularities in data sets, in particular, in election results and financial statements. Yet, basic financial market indices have not been much studied, if…
Exponential growth occurs when the growth rate of a given quantity is proportional to the quantity's current value. Surprisingly, when exponential growth data is plotted as a simple histogram disregarding the time dimension, a remarkable…
It has long been known that sequences such as the powers of $2$ 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…
A beautiful theorem of Zeckendorf states that every integer can be written uniquely as the sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers $\{ F_i \}_{i = 1}^{\infty}$. A set $S \subset \mathbb{Z}$ is said to satisfy Benford's law if the density…
Feller's classic text 'An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications' contains a derivation of the well known significant-digit law called Benford's law. More specifically, Feller gives a sufficient condition ("large spread")…
A simple method to derive parametric analytical extensions of Benford's law for first digits of numerical data is proposed. Two generalized Benford distributions are considered, namely the two-sided power Benford distribution and the new…
Suppose that in a multiple choice examination the leading digit of the correct options follows Benford's Law, while the the leading digit of the distractors are uniform. Consider a strategy for guessing at answers that selects the option…