Published in Journal of public health (Oxford, England)
I use Benford's law to assess whether there is misreporting of coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) deaths in the USA. I use three statistics to determine whether the reported deaths for US states are consistent with Benford's law, where the probability of smaller digits is greater than the probability of larger digits. My findings indicate that ...
Published in Journal of public health (Oxford, England)
Previous studies have used Benford's distribution to assess the accuracy of COVID-19 data. Data inaccuracies provide false information to the media, undermine global response and hinder the preventive measures taken by authorities. Daily new cases and deaths from all the countries of the European Union were analyzed and the conformance to Benford's...
Published in European Journal of Physics
It has been known for more than a century that, counter to one’s intuition, the frequency of occurrence of the first significant digit in a very large number of numerical data sets is nonuniformly distributed. This result is encapsulated in Benford’s law, which states that the first (and higher) digits follow a logarithmic distribution. An interest...
Benford’s law is based on an observation that certain digits occur more often than others in a set of numbers. This have provided researchers to apply the law in different areas including identifying digit patterns and manipulated data. To our knowledge, this have yet not been tested in the Swedish housing market. The purpose of this thesis is to e...
Published in Physica A
For many countries attempting to control the fast-rising number of coronavirus cases and deaths, the race is on to "flatten the curve," since the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has taken on pandemic proportions. In the absence of significant control interventions, the curve could be steep, with the number of COVID-19 cases growing ex...
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 is to aid researchers who are interested in applying Benford’s law, and need to understand general principles...
Published in Automatic Control and Computer Sciences
AbstractBenford’s law describes the distribution of the first significant digits in numerical data characterizing real processes. In particular, it is widely used to detect anomalies in financial data. The paper proposes application of Benford’s law to detect DoS attacks on large-scale industrial system components. The results of experimental resea...
We provide conditions on dependent and on non-stationary random variables Xn ensuring that the mantissa of the sequence of products (∏n1 Xk) is almost surely distributed following the Benford’s law or converges in distribution to the Benford’s law
Published in Lettera Matematica
In this article we give an informal presentation of the so-called Benford’s law, a counterintuitive probability distribution that describes the frequency with which the first significant digits—that is, a digit between 1 and 9—appear in sets of numbers associated with heterogeneous quantities. Unlike what might be expected, these frequencies are no...
Let (dn) be a sequence of positive numbers and let (Xn) be a sequence of positive independent random variables. We provide an upper bound for the deviation between the distribution of the mantissaes of (Xdnn ) and the Benford’s law. If dn goes to infinity at a rate at most polynomial, this deviation converges a.s. to 0 as N goes to infinity
