Benford's Law
Definition
The empirical observation that in naturally occurring numerical data spanning multiple orders of magnitude, the leading digit d appears with probability log10(1 + 1/d), giving 1 a roughly 30.1% frequency and 9 a roughly 4.6% frequency.
Related terms
- Chi-square test
- A goodness-of-fit test comparing the observed digit frequencies in a dataset to the expected Benford frequencies, producing a test statistic that is...
- Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD)
- A practical Benford conformity measure that averages the absolute differences between observed and expected proportions across all leading digits, with Nigrini benchmarks...
- Second-digit test
- Analysis of the second significant digit in isolation, where 0 is expected to appear about 11.97% of the time. A spike in...
- Two-digit test
- An extension of Benford's Law to the first two significant digits, producing 90 possible combinations each with a predicted frequency, which is...
- Z-statistic
- A per-digit test that calculates whether the deviation between an observed frequency and the Benford expected frequency for that single digit is...
Explained in
- Benford's Law and Digital AnalysisThe empirical observation that in naturally occurring numerical data spanning multiple orders of magnitude, the leading digit d appears with probability log10(...