Related papers: Severe testing of Benford's law

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…

We discuss a common suspicion about reported financial data, in 10 industrial sectors of the 6 so called "main developing countries" over the time interval [2000-2014]. These data are examined through Benford's law first significant digit…

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…

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…

Mathematical inequalities, combined with atomic-physics sum rules, enable one to derive lower and upper bounds for the Rosseland and/or Planck mean opacities. The resulting constraints must be satisfied, either for pure elements or…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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")…

The value of a social network is generally determined by its size and the connectivity of its nodes. But since some of the nodes may be fake ones and others that are dormant, the question of validating the node counts by statistical tests…

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…

A popular approach to significance testing proposes to decide whether the given hypothesized statistical model is likely to be true (or false). Statistical decision theory provides a basis for this approach by requiring every significance…

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…

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…

Benford's law is a famous law in statistics which states that the leading digits of random variables in diverse data sets appear not uniformly from 1 to 9; the probability that d (d=1,...,9) appears as a leading digit is given by…