Related papers: Generalizing Benford's law using power laws: appli…

In the literature, Benford's Law is considered for base-b expansions where b>1 is an integer. In this paper, we investigate the distribution of leading "digits" of a sequence of positive integers under other expansions such as Zeckendorf…

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…

Benford's law predicts the occurrence of the $n^{\mathrm{th}}$ digit of numbers in datasets originating from various sources of the world, ranging from financial data to atomic spectra. It is intriguing that although many features of…

The diverse applications of the Benford law attract investigators working in various fields of physics, biology and sociology. At the same time, the groundings of the Benford law remain obscure. Our paper demonstrates that the Benford law…

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…

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…

This article provides a concise overview of the main mathematical theory of Benford's law in a form accessible to scientists and students who have had first courses in calculus and probability. In particular, one of the main objectives here…

Benford's Law describes the prevalence of small numbers as the leading digits of numbers in many sets of integers. We prove a variant of Benford's law for many positive-density subsets of the primes. This follows from a more general result…

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-…

A statistical model for the fragmentation of a conserved quantity is analyzed, using the principle of maximum entropy and the theory of partitions. Upper and lower bounds for the restricted partitioning problem are derived and applied to…

Benford's law is a statistical inference to predict the frequency of significant digits in naturally occurring numerical databases. In such databases this law predicts a higher occurrence of the digit 1 in the most significant place and…

In this paper, we present a possible theoretical explanation for benford's law. We develop a recursive relation between the probabilities, using simple intuitive ideas. We first use numerical solutions of this recursion and verify that the…

Benford's law is frequently used to evaluate the likihood that data is misrepresentative. Typically statistical tests measure the likihood. Another method of employing Benford's law is to compare the frequency of leading digits to the…

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 an empirical ``law'' governing the frequency of leading digits in numerical data sets. Surprisingly, for mathematical sequences the predictions derived from it can be uncannily accurate. For example, among the first billion…

We found that in transition arrays of complex atomic spectra, the strengths of electric-dipolar lines obey Benford's law, which means that their significant digits follow a logarithmic distribution favoring the smallest values. This…

A phenomenological law, called Benford's law, states that the occurrence of the first digit, i.e., $1,2,...,9$, of numbers from many real world sources is not uniformly distributed, but instead favors smaller ones according to a logarithmic…

We explain Kossovsky's generalization of Benford's law which is a formula that approximates the distribution of leftmost digits in finite sequences of natural data and apply it to six sequences of data including populations of US cities and…

The Newcomb-Benford Law, which is also called the first digit phenomenon, has applications in diverse phenomena ranging from social and computer networks, engineering systems, natural sciences, and accounting. In forensics, it has been used…

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…