A simple explanation of benford’s law

American Statistician

Volumn 63, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 26-32

  Fewster, R M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

First digit phenomenon; Law of anomalous numbers

Indexed keywords

EID: 63549150030     PISSN: 00031305     EISSN: 15372731     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1198/tast.2009.0005     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Benford, F. (1938), “The Law of Anomalous Numbers,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 78, 551-572.
2. Cho, W. K. T., and Gaines, B. J. (2007), “Breaking the (Benford) Law: Statistical Fraud Detection in Campaign Finance,” The American Statistician, 61, 218-223.
3. Fewster, R.M., and Patenaude, N. J. (2008), “Cubic Splines for Estimating the Distribution of Residence Time Using Individual Resightings Data,” in Modeling Demographic Processes in Marked Populations, eds. D. L. Thomson, E. G. Cooch, and M. J. Conroy. Environmental and Ecological Statistics Series, 3, 393-415.
4. Hastie, T. J., and Tibshirani, R. J. (1990), Generalized Additive Models, London: Chapman and Hall, p. 27.
5. Hill, T. P. (1995), “A Statistical Derivation of the Significant-Digit Law,” Statistical Science, 10, 354-363.
6. Mardia, K. V., and Jupp, P. E. (2000), Directional Statistics, Chichester: Wiley, Example 4.1.
7. Newcomb, S. (1881), “Note on the Frequency of Use of the Different Digits in Natural Numbers,” American Journal ofMathematics, 4, 39-40.
8. Raimi, R. A. (1976), “The First Digit Problem,” The American Mathematical Monthly, 83, 521-538.
9. Smith, S.W. (2007), “Explaining Benford’s Law,” Chapter 34 in The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing. Available at http://www.dspguide.com/.