English
Related papers

Related papers: Double-Crossing Benford's Law

200 papers

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

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,…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-08-16 Irfan Durmić , Steven J. Miller

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…

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

The goal of this note is to show that a widespread claim about Benford's Law, namely, that the range of every Benford distribution spans at least several orders of magnitude, is false. The proof is constructive and concrete examples are…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-11-30 Theodore P. Hill

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

Benford's Law describes the finding that the distribution of leading (or leftmost) digits of innumerable datasets follows a well-defined logarithmic trend, rather than an intuitive uniformity. In practice this means that the most common…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-11-20 Aaron D. Slepkov , Kevin B. Ironside , David DiBattista

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

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

That the logarithmic distribution manifests itself in the random as well as in the deterministic (multiplication processes) has long intrigued researchers in Benford's Law. In this article it is argued that it springs from one common…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-11-01 Alex Ely Kossovsky

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 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…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-01-20 Victoria Cuff , Allison Lewis , Steven J. Miller

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-06-19 Subhash Kak

Many mathematical, man-made and natural systems exhibit a leading-digit bias, where a first digit (base 10) of 1 occurs not 11\% of the time, as one would expect if all digits were equally likely, but rather 30\%. This phenomenon is known…

The probability that a number in many naturally occurring tables of numerical data has first significant digit $d$ is predicted by Benford's Law ${\rm Prob} (d) = \log_{10} (1 + {\displaystyle{1\over d}}), d = 1, 2 >..., 9$. Illustrations…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Zhipeng Li , Lin Cong , Huajia Wang

This article presents a concise proof of the famous Benford's law when the distribution has a Riemann integrable probability density function and provides a criterion to judge whether a distribution obeys the law. The proof is intuitive and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-08-07 Luohan Wang , Bo-Qiang Ma

Benford's Law predicts that the first significant digit on the leftmost side of numbers in real-life data is proportioned between all possible 1 to 9 digits approximately as in LOG(1 + 1/digit), so that low digits occur much more frequently…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-01-04 Alex Ely Kossovsky

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 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 prevalence of small numbers as the leading digits of numbers in many sets of integers. We prove a variant of Benford's law for many positive-density subsets of the primes. This follows from a more general result…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2022-07-18 Henry Glunz
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›