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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…
Benford's law is the statement that in many real world data sets, the probability of having digit $d$ in base $B$ as the first digit is \log_{B}\!\left(\frac{d+1}{d}\right) for all $1 \leq d \leq B$. We sometimes refer to this as weak…
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,…
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…
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…
We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the sum of M independent continuous random variables modulo 1 to converge to the uniform distribution in L^1([0,1]), and discuss generalizations to discrete random variables. A consequence…
A statistical model for the fragmentation of a conserved quantity is analyzed, using the principle of maximum entropy and the theory of partitions. Upper and lower bounds for the restricted partitioning problem are derived and applied to…
A sequence of real numbers (x_n) is Benford if the significands, i.e. the fraction parts in the floating-point representation of (x_n) are distributed logarithmically. Similarly, a discrete-time irreducible and aperiodic finite-state Markov…
We provide general expressions for the joint distributions of the $k$ most significant $b$-ary digits and of the $k$ leading continued fraction coefficients of outcomes of an arbitrary continuous random variable. Our analysis highlights the…
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")…
We establish a coboundary condition for a sequence of ergodic sums (i.e.~Birkhoff partial sums) to be almost surely uniformly distributed mod $1$. Applications are given when the sequence is generated by a Gibbs-Markov map. In particular,…
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,…
We consider random permutations derived by sampling from stick-breaking partitions of the unit interval. The cycle structure of such a permutation can be associated with the path of a decreasing Markov chain on $n$ integers. Under certain…
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…
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…
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…
A lattice-based model for continuum percolation is applied to the case of randomly located, partially aligned sticks with unequal lengths in 2D which are allowed to cross each other. Results are obtained for the critical number of sticks…
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…
Consider generalized adapted stochastic integrals with respect to independently scattered random measures with second moments. We use a decoupling technique, known as the "principle of conditioning", to study their stable convergence…
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…