(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
A few months ago I received in the mail a book called An Introduction to Benford’s Law by Arno Berger and Theodore Hill. I eagerly opened it but I lost interest once I realized it was essentially a pure math book. Not that there’s anything wrong with math, it just wasn’t what I wanted to read.
But, hey, the book got reviewed by Frank Benford himself (well, actually, Frank Benford the grandson of Frank Benford himself), and the review has some math too. Should be of interest to some of you.
P.S. On the applied end, Ethan Rouen sends along a recent paper, Financial statement errors: evidence from the distributional properties of financial statement numbers, where Dan Amiram, and Zahn Bozanic, and Rouen “use Benford’s Law to measure the amount of error contained in a firm’s financial statements and show how the law can be used to help predict fraud.”
Here’s an example:
Which somehow reminds me of this classic plot:
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