Related papers: Order Statistics and Benford's Law
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…
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…
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 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…
Prime numbers seem to distribute among the natural numbers with no other law than that of chance, however its global distribution presents a quite remarkable smoothness. Such interplay between randomness and regularity has motivated sci-…
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…
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 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…
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…
According to Benford's Law, many data sets have a bias towards lower leading digits (about $30\%$ are $1$'s). The applications of Benford's Law vary: from detecting tax, voter and image fraud to determining the possibility of match-fixing…
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…
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…
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…
Exponential growth occurs when the growth rate of a given quantity is proportional to the quantity's current value. Surprisingly, when exponential growth data is plotted as a simple histogram disregarding the time dimension, a remarkable…
It is known that if X is uniformly distributed modulo 1 and Y is an arbitrary random variable independent of X then Y+X is also uniformly distributed modulo 1. We prove a converse for any continuous random variable Y (or a reasonable…
We show how Benford's Law (BL) for first, second, ..., digits, emerges from the distribution of digits of numbers of the type $a^{R}$, with $a$ any real positive number and $R$ a set of real numbers uniformly distributed in an interval $[…
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…
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…
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…