What does benford's law mean?

Definitions for benford's law
ben·ford's law

This dictionary definitions page includes all the possible meanings, example usage and translations of the word benford's law.

Princeton's WordNet

  1. Benford's lawnoun

    a law used by auditors to identify fictitious populations of numbers; applies to any population of numbers derived from other numbers

    "Benford's law holds that 30% of the time the first non-zero digit of a derived number will be 1 and it will be 9 only 4.6% of the time"

Wikipedia

  1. Benford's law

    Benford's law, also known as the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small. In sets that obey the law, the number 1 appears as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the leading significant digit less than 5% of the time. If the digits were distributed uniformly, they would each occur about 11.1% of the time. Benford's law also makes predictions about the distribution of second digits, third digits, digit combinations, and so on. The graph to the right shows Benford's law for base 10, one of infinitely many cases of a generalized law regarding numbers expressed in arbitrary (integer) bases, which rules out the possibility that the phenomenon might be an artifact of the base-10 number system. Further generalizations published in 1995 included analogous statements for both the nth leading digit and the joint distribution of the leading n digits, the latter of which leads to a corollary wherein the significant digits are shown to be a statistically dependent quantity. It has been shown that this result applies to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, house prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, and physical and mathematical constants. Like other general principles about natural data—for example, the fact that many data sets are well approximated by a normal distribution—there are illustrative examples and explanations that cover many of the cases where Benford's law applies, though there are many other cases where Benford's law applies that resist simple explanations. Benford's Law tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude, especially if the process generating the numbers is described by a power law (which is common in nature). The law is named after physicist Frank Benford, who stated it in 1938 in an article titled "The Law of Anomalous Numbers", although it had been previously stated by Simon Newcomb in 1881.The law is similar in concept, though not identical in distribution, to Zipf's law.

ChatGPT

  1. benford's law

    Benford's Law, also known as the First-Digit Law, refers to the phenomenon that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading digit is likely to be small. In particular, this law predicts that the first digit in such numbers is likely to be 1 about 30% of the time, and that numbers beginning with larger digits occur as the leading digit less frequently, specifically in decreasing order of frequency ending with the largest first digit of 9. This principle is used in various fields including economics, statistics, computer science, and even in fraud detection for identifying anomalies.

Wikidata

  1. Benford's law

    Benford's Law, also called the First-Digit Law, refers to the frequency distribution of digits in many real-life sources of data. In this distribution, the number 1 occurs as the leading digit about 30% of the time, while larger numbers occur in that position less frequently: 9 as the first digit less than 5% of the time. Benford's Law also concerns the expected distribution for digits beyond the first, which approach a uniform distribution. This result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws. It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude. The graph here shows Benford's Law for base 10. There is a generalization of the law to numbers expressed in other bases, and also a generalization from leading 1 digit to leading n digits. It is named after physicist Frank Benford, who stated it in 1938, although it had been previously stated by Simon Newcomb in 1881.

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Numerology

  1. Chaldean Numerology

    The numerical value of benford's law in Chaldean Numerology is: 1

  2. Pythagorean Numerology

    The numerical value of benford's law in Pythagorean Numerology is: 2


Translations for benford's law

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  • பென்ஃபோர்டின் சட்டம்Tamil

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"benford's law." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 24 Apr. 2024. <https://www.definitions.net/definition/benford%27s+law>.

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