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Morrow, J (2014)

Benford’s Law, Families of Distributions and a Test Basis

Center for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No 1291.

ISSN/ISBN: Not available at this time. DOI: Not available at this time.



Abstract: Benford's Law is used to test for data irregularities. While novel, there are two weaknesses in the current methodology. First, test values used in practice are too conservative and the test values of this paper are more powerful and hold for fairly small samples. Second, testing requires Benford's Law to hold, which it often does not. I present a simple method to transform distributions to satisfy the Law with arbitrary precision and induce scale invariance, freeing tests from the choice of units. I additionally derive a rate of convergence to Benford's Law. Finally, the results are applied to common distributions.


Bibtex:
@misc{, AUTHOR = {John Morrow}, TITLE = {Benford’s Law, Families of Distributions and a Test Basis}, PUBLISHER = {Center for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No. 1291} HOWPUBLISHED = {\url{http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1291.pdf}}, YEAR = {2014}, NOTE = {last accessed May 26, 2018}, }


Reference Type: E-Print

Subject Area(s): Statistics