Essentially, Benford’s law predicts a certain distribution of numbers – violations of that distribution indicate fabricated data. Turns out Boing Boing had a post on this just a few weeks ago. The best treatment of it is on Wolfram’s Mathworld pages, which also has an extensive bibliography (always a plus.) I’m interested in studying applications of it. Fraud detection in accounting seem to be the a use, but I don’t know how commonly used it is. Another application described in the following article as a way to detect whether random numbers are truly random (or if they are merely faked.)
February 24, 2006
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