Can someone explain Benford’s Law to me. I get that certain numbers show up more often in large data sets, but why?
In: Mathematics
Benford’s law is specifically that the leading digit in datasets is more likely to be small.
Let’s say you have a random sample of numbers between 0 and 999. In that case the leading digit would be evenly spread between 1 and 9. Which is what we would expect.
But what if it was a random sample between 0 and 1999? Then over half of the numbers in the sample would have a leading digit of 1.
This is an example of why having a dataset that has multiple orders of magnitude can skew toward smaller leading digits.
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