Related papers: Order Statistics and Benford's Law
The first digit law, also known as Benford's law or the significant digit law, is an empirical phenomenon that the leading digit of numbers from real world sources favors small ones in a form $\log(1+{1}/{d})$, where $d=1, 2, ..., 9$. Such…
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…
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…
We consider the continued fraction digits as random variables measured with respect to Lebesgue measure. The logarithmically scaled and normalized fluctuation process of the digit sums converges strongly distributional to a random variable…
The yearly aggregated tax income data of all, more than 8000, Italian municipalities are analyzed for a period of five years, from 2007 to 2011, to search for conformity or not with Benford's law, a counter-intuitive phenomenon observed in…
In this work, we prove the joint convergence in distribution of $q$ variables modulo one obtained as partial sums of a sequence of i.i.d. square integrable random variables multiplied by a common factor given by some function of an…
Benford's law is widely used for fraud-detection nowadays. The underlying assumption for using the law is that a "regular" dataset follows the significant digit phenomenon. In this paper, we address the scenario where a shrewd fraudster…
We discuss a common suspicion about reported financial data, in 10 industrial sectors of the 6 so called "main developing countries" over the time interval [2000-2014]. These data are examined through Benford's law first significant digit…
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…
Let $X_1, X_2,\ldots, X_n$ (resp. $Y_1, Y_2,\ldots, Y_n$) be independent random variables such that $X_i$ (resp. $Y_i$) follows generalized exponential distribution with shape parameter $\theta_i$ and scale parameter $\lambda_i$ (resp.…
We investigate stochastic comparisons between exponential family distributions and their mixtures with respect to the usual stochastic order, the hazard rate order, the reversed hazard rate order, and the likelihood ratio order. A general…
A recent article by Alexopoulos and Leontsinis presented empirical evidence that the first digits of the distances to galaxies are a reasonably good fit to the probabilities predicted by Benford's law, the well known logarithmic statistical…
Considering the first significant digits (noted d) in data sets of dissipation for turbulent flows, the probability to find a given number (d=1 or 2 or... 9) would be 1/9 for an uniform distribution. Instead the probability closely follows…
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…
We study multi-digit correlations in Benford sequences b^n for integer bases 2 <= b <= 1000, measuring dependence via conditional mutual information (CMI). A resonance ratio derived from the continued fraction expansion of log_10(b)…
The beta normal distribution is a generalization of both the normal distribution and the normal order statistics. Some of its mathematical properties and a few applications have been studied in the literature. We provide a better foundation…
On the assumption of the Riemann hypothesis and a spacing hypothesis for the nontrivial zeros $\frac12+i\gamma$ of the Riemann zeta function, we show that the sequence \[ \Gamma_{[a, b]} =\Bigg\{ \gamma : \gamma>0 \quad \mbox{and} \quad…
Benford's law, or the law of the first significant digit, has been subjected to numerous studies due to its unique applications in financial fields, especially accounting and auditing. However, studies that addressed the law's establishment…
Benford's law states that the occurrence of significant digits in many data sets is not uniform but tends to follow a logarithmic distribution such that the smaller digits appear as first significant digits more frequently than the larger…
The first digit (FD) phenomenon i.e., the significant digits of numbers in large data are often distributed according to a logarithmically decreasing function was first reported by S. Newcomb and then many decades later independently by F.…