Related papers: Why Eight Percent of Benford Sequences Never Conve…

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…

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…

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…

A random variable X that is base b Benford will not in general be base c Benford when c is not equal to b. This paper builds on two of my earlier papers and is an attempt to cast some light on the issue of base dependence. Following some…

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…

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…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet they frequently fail on basic numerical problems, producing incorrect outputs. Inspired by Benford's Law, a statistical pattern in which lower…

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…

There are now many theoretical explanations for why Benford's law of digit bias surfaces in so many diverse fields and data sets. After briefly reviewing some of these, we discuss in depth recurrence relations. As these are discrete…

Regression on observational data can fail to capture a causal relationship in the presence of unobserved confounding. Confounding strength measures this mismatch, but estimating it requires itself additional assumptions. A common assumption…

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…

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…

We prove several results about the rate of convergence to stationarity, that is, the spectral gap, for the M/M/n queue in the Halfin-Whitt regime. We identify the limiting rate of convergence to steady-state, and discover an asymptotic…

Let f_n denote a kernel density estimator of a continuous density f in d dimensions, bounded and positive. Let \Psi(t) be a positive continuous function such that \|\Psi f^{\beta}\|_{\infty}<\infty for some 0<\beta<1/2. Under natural…

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…

In this paper we study some asymptotic properties of the kernel conditional quantile estimator with randomly left-truncated data which exhibit some kind of dependence. We extend the result obtained by Lemdani, Ould-Sa\"id and Poulin [16] in…

Multi-layer feedforward networks have been used to approximate a wide range of nonlinear functions. An important and fundamental problem is to understand the learnability of a network model through its statistical risk, or the expected…

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…

The scope of this paper is twofold. First, to emphasize the use of the mod 1 map in exploring the digit distribution of random variables. We show that the well-known base- and scale-invariance of Benford variables are consequences of their…