Related papers: Benford Behavior in Stick Fragmentation Problems
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…
In many real life situations, it is observed that the first digits (i.e., $1,2,\ldots,9$) of a numerical data-set, which is expressed using decimal system, do not follow a random distribution. Instead, smaller numbers are favoured by nature…
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…
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…
We study the individual digits for the absolute value of the characteristic polynomial for the Circular $\beta$-Ensemble. We show that, in the large $N$ limit, the first digits obey Benford's Law and the further digits become uniformly…
Researchers have observed that the frequencies of leading digits in many man-made and naturally occurring datasets follow a logarithmic curve, with digits that start with the number 1 accounting for $\sim 30\%$ of all numbers in the dataset…
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…
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…
Benford's law is an empirical observation, first reported by Simon Newcomb in 1881 and then independently by Frank Benford in 1938: the first significant digits of numbers in large data are often distributed according to a logarithmically…
We provide conditions on dependent and on non-stationary random variables $X_n$ ensuring that the mantissa of the sequence of products $\left(\prod_{1}^{n}X_k\right)$ is almost surely distributed following the Benford's law or converges in…
Kossovsky recently conjectured that the distribution of leading digits of a chain of probability distributions converges to Benford's law as the length of the chain grows. We prove his conjecture in many cases, and provide an interpretation…
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…
Let $S_{a,b}$ denote the sequence of leading digits of $a^n$ in base $b$. It is well known that if $a$ is not a rational power of $b$, then the sequence $S_{a,b}$ satisfies Benford's Law; that is, digit $d$ occurs in $S_{a,b}$ with…
Benford's law is often used as a support to critical decisions related to data quality or the presence of data manipulations or even fraud. However, many authors argue that conventional statistical tests will reject the null of data…
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 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…
We prove that many sequences of positive numbers $(a_n)$ defined by finite linear difference equations $a_{n+k}=c_{k-1}a_{n+k-1}+...+c_0a_n$ with suitable non negative reals coefficients $c_i$ satisfy Bendford's Law on the first digit in…
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…
Let $\mathcal{I} \subset \mathbb{N}$ be an infinite subset, and let $\{a_i\}_{i \in \mathcal{I}}$ be a sequence of nonzero real numbers indexed by $\mathcal{I}$ such that there exist positive constants $m, C_1$ for which $|a_i| \leq C_1…
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…