Informing
Policy
for Progress

Benford’s Law: A survey of its varied applications

Report /
July 2022

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CITATION

Maital, S., & Barzani, E. (2022). Benford’s Law: A survey of its varied applications. Samuel Neaman Institute.
https://www.neaman.org.il/en/benfords-law/

Benford’s Law, or Newcomb-Benford Law, states that in many data sets, the leading digits (1’s, 2’s, etc.) will be much more frequent – 30% will be 1’s, for instance.

This law has been widely used in many applications, including detection of fraud and data manipulation. This paper surveys some of the more interesting papers, and offers an explanation of the Law.

 

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