[ExI] Benford's Law

[Dan]

Yeah, I first heard about this in connection with catching embezzlers. People who faked books often will use a completely random distribution in the accounts, when the real world distro tends to fit Benford's Law.

Regards,

Dan


From: Michael LaTorra <mlatorra at gmail.com>
To: WTA Talk <wta-talk at transhumanism.org>; ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Tue, June 15, 2010 10:17:34 PM
Subject: [ExI] Benford's Law


"Benford's Law is the observation that most “real-world” data is not uniformly distributed - in fact, the probability that the first digit is a “1” is almost one-third, rather than the expected one-ninth. The reason for this is that the *logarithm* of most real-world data is uniformly distributed. I find this mildly fascinating." - David Dalrymple
http://blog.davidad.net/


      
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