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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

Benford's law is a statistical inference to predict the frequency of significant digits in naturally occurring numerical databases. In such databases this law predicts a higher occurrence of the digit 1 in the most significant place and…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2016-01-20 Gaurav Bhole , Abhishek Shukla , T. S. Mahesh

This article provides a brief overview on a range of basic dynamical systems that conform to the logarithmic distribution of significant digits known as Benford's law. As presented here, most theorems are special cases of known, more…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2025-01-27 Arno Berger , Theodore P. Hill

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-01-08 Alex Ely Kossovsky

Suppose you look at today's stock prices and bet on the value of the first digit. One could guess that a fair bet should correspond to the frequency of $1/9 = 11.11%$ for each digit from 1 to 9. This is by no means the case, and one can…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2008-12-02 L. Pietronero , E. Tosatti , V. Tosatti , A. Vespignani

This article provides a concise overview of the main mathematical theory of Benford's law in a form accessible to scientists and students who have had first courses in calculus and probability. In particular, one of the main objectives here…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-04-22 Arno Berger , Theodore P. Hill

The renowned proverb, Numbers do not lie, underscores the reliability and insight that lie beneath numbers, a concept of undisputed importance, especially in economics and finance etc. Despite the prosperity of Benford's Law in the first…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Fuqian Zhang , Zhenhua Wang

We found that in transition arrays of complex atomic spectra, the strengths of electric-dipolar lines obey Benford's law, which means that their significant digits follow a logarithmic distribution favoring the smallest values. This…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-12-13 Jean-Christophe Pain

Benford's law describes a common phenomenon among many naturally occurring data sets and distributions in which the leading digits of the data are distributed with the probability of a first digit of $d$ base $B$ being…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-10-30 Rebecca F. Durst , 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

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…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2015-06-26 Alex V. Kontorovich , Steven J. Miller

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…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-30 Zhaodong Cai , Matthew Faust , A. J. Hildebrand , Junxian Li , Yuan Zhang

We develop two complementary generative mechanisms that explain when and why Benford's first-digit law arises. First, a probabilistic Turing machine (PTM) ensemble induces a geometric law for codelength. Maximizing its entropy under a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Alexander Kolpakov , Aidan Rocke

Benford's Law (BL) or the Significant Digit Law defines the probability distribution of the first digit of numerical values in a data sample. This Law is observed in many naturally occurring datasets. It can be seen as a measure of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-25 Surya Kant Sahu , Abhinav Java , Arshad Shaikh , Yannic Kilcher

The occurrence of digits one through nine as the leftmost nonzero digit of numbers from real world sources is often not uniformly distributed, but instead, is distributed according to a logarithmic law, known as Benford's law. Here, we…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2010-05-14 Lijing Shao , Bo-Qiang Ma

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

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,…

Probability · Mathematics 2008-06-25 Lutz Duembgen , Christoph Leuenberger

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

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

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