Scatter and regularity imply Benford's law and more

zbMATH Open1238.60019arXiv0910.1359MaRDI QIDQ3224079FDOQ3224079

Authors: Nicolas Gauvrit, Jean-Paul Delahaye 

Publication date: 29 March 2012

Abstract: A random variable (r.v.) X is said to follow Benford's law if log(X) is uniform mod 1. Many experimental data sets prove to follow an approximate version of it, and so do many mathematical series and continuous random variables. This phenomenon received some interest, and several explanations have been put forward. Most of them focus on specific data, depending on strong assumptions, often linked with the log function. Some authors hinted - implicitly - that the two most important characteristics of a random variable when it comes to Benford are regularity and scatter. In a first part, we prove two theorems, making up a formal version of this intuition: scattered and regular r.v.'s do approximately follow Benford's law. The proofs only need simple mathematical tools, making the analysis easy. Previous explanations thus become corollaries of a more general and simpler one. These results suggest that Benford's law does not depend on properties linked with the log function. We thus propose and test a general version of the Benford's law. The success of these tests may be viewed as an a posteriori validation of the analysis formulated in the first part.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1359

Recommendations

• General Benford law
• Sufficient conditions for Benford's law
• A characterization of Benford's law through generalized scale-invariance
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 5200078
• Measuring the conformity of distributions to Benford's law

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Probability distributions: general theory (60E05) Probability in computer science (algorithm analysis, random structures, phase transitions, etc.) (68Q87) General theory of distribution modulo (1) (11K06) Special sequences (11K31)

Cited In (6)

• Title not available (Why is that?)
• General Benford law
• BeyondBenford R package to compare Benford's and BDS's distributions
• On the significands of uniform random variables
• An alternative to the oversimplifying Benford's law in experimental fields
• Best finite approximations of Benford's law

This page was built for publication: Scatter and regularity imply Benford's law\(\ldots \) and more

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q3224079)