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Related papers: Robust inference under Benford's law

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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

The uneven distribution of digits in numerical data, known as Benford's law, was discovered in 1881. Since then, this law has been shown to be correct in copious numerical data relating to economics, physics and even prime numbers. Although…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2009-07-28 Oded Kafri

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

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

Real data often contain anomalous cases, also known as outliers. These may spoil the resulting analysis but they may also contain valuable information. In either case, the ability to detect such anomalies is essential. A useful tool for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-13 Peter J. Rousseeuw , Mia Hubert

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

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 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

A random variable (r.v.) X is said to follow Benford's law if log(X) is uniform mod 1. Many experimental data sets prove to follow an approximate version of it, and so do many mathematical series and continuous random variables. This…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-10-09 Nicolas Gauvrit , Jean-Paul Delahaye

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…

Atomic Physics · Physics 2023-11-17 Jean-Christophe Pain , Patricia Croset

Detecting point anomalies in bank account balances is essential for financial institutions, as it enables the identification of potential fraud, operational issues, or other irregularities. Robust statistics is useful for flagging outliers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Federico Maddanu , Tommaso Proietti , Riccardo Crupi

Benford's law is an empirical edict stating that the lower digits appear more often than higher ones as the first few significant digits in statistics of natural phenomena and mathematical tables. A marked proportion of such analyses is…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-07-16 Anindita Bera , Utkarsh Mishra , Sudipto Singha Roy , Anindya Biswas , Aditi Sen De , Ujjwal Sen

Anomaly detection is a method for discovering unusual and suspicious behavior. In many real-world scenarios, the examined events can be directly linked to the actions of an adversary, such as attacks on computer networks or frauds in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-23 Olga Petrova , Karel Durkota , Galina Alperovich , Karel Horak , Michal Najman , Branislav Bosansky , Viliam Lisy

Most research designing novel predictive models, or employing existing ones, assumes that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. In practice, the data encountered at serving time often deviate from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Hanyu Duan , Yi Yang , Ahmed Abbasi , Kar Yan Tam

The occurrence of digits 1 through 9 as the leftmost nonzero digit of numbers from real-world sources is distributed unevenly according to an empirical law, known as Benford's law or the first digit law. It remains obscure why a variety of…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2019-05-02 Mingshu Cong , Congqiao Li , Bo-Qiang Ma

This paper studies the problem of detecting adversarial perturbations in a sequence of observations. Given a data sample $X_1, \ldots, X_n$ drawn from a standard normal distribution, an adversary, after observing the sample, can perturb…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-10-28 Gleb Smirnov

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

Anomaly detection has many applications ranging from bank-fraud detection and cyber-threat detection to equipment maintenance and health monitoring. However, choosing a suitable algorithm for a given application remains a challenging design…

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 2019-01-03 Alex Ely Kossovsky

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