View Complete Reference

Giuliano, R and Janvresse, E (2010)

A unifying probabilistic interpretation of Benford's Law

Uniform Distribution Theory 5(2), pp. 169-182.

ISSN/ISBN: 1336-913X DOI: Not available at this time.



Abstract: We propose a probabilistic interpretation of Benford’s law, which predicts the probability distribution of all digits in everyday-life numbers. Heuristically, our point of view consists in considering an everyday-life number as a continuous random variable taking value in an interval [0,A], whose maximum A is itself an everyday-life number. This approach can be linked to the characterization of Benford’s law by scale-invariance, as well as to the convergence of a product of independent random variables to Benford’s law. It also allows to generalize Flehinger’s result about the convergence of iterations of Cesaro-averages to Benford’s law.


Bibtex:
@article{, AUTHOR = {Rita Giuliano and Élise Janvresse}, YEAR = {2010}, JOURNAL = {Uniform Distribution Theory}, VOLUME = {5}, NUMBER = {2}, PAGES = {169--182}, URL = {https://math.boku.ac.at/udt/vol05/no2/91GiulJan10-2.pdf}, }


Reference Type: Journal Article

Subject Area(s): Probability Theory