Benford's law
Observation that in many real-life datasets, the leading digit is likely to be small
Benford's law
Benford's law, also known as the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small. In sets that obey the law, the number 1 appears as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the leading significant digit less than 5% of the time. Uniformly distributed digits would each occur about 11.1% of the time. Benford's law also makes predictions about the distribution of second digits, third digits, digit combinations, and so on. Benford's law may be derived by assuming the dataset values are uniformly distributed on a logarithmic scale. The graph to the right shows Benford's law for base 10. Although a decimal base is most common, the result generalizes to any integer base greater than or equal to 2. Further generalizations published in 1995 included analogous statements for both the nth leading digit and the joint distribution of...
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