Related papers: A Proof of First Digit Law from Laplace Transform
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…