Data validity and statistical conformity with Benford’s Law

Roy Cerqueti and Mario Maggi

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2021, vol. 144, issue C

Abstract: Benford’s Law is a statistical regularity of a large number of datasets; assessing the compliance of a large dataset with the Benford’s Law is a theme of remarkable relevance, mainly for its practical consequences. Such a task can be faced by introducing a statistical distance concept between the empirical distribution of the data and the random variable associated with Benford’s Law. This paper deals with the problem of measuring the compliance of a random variable – which can be seen as describing the empirical distribution of a collection of data – with the Benford’s Law. It proposes a statistical methodology for detecting the critical values related to conformity/nonconformity with Benford’s Law in some well-established cases of statistical distance. The followed approach is grounded on the proper selection of a family of parametric random variables – the lognormal distribution, in our case – and of a reference statistical distance concept – mean absolute deviation. A discussion of the obtained results is carried out on the ground of the existing literature. Moreover, some open problems are also presented.

Keywords: Data science; Benford’s Law; Lognormal distribution; Statistical distance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:144:y:2021:i:c:s096007792100093x

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2021.110740

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