Chapter 5. Benford's Law – Detecting Natural Progressions of Numbers
In this chapter, we'll look at Benford's Law; an interesting set of properties that are inherent in many naturally occurring sequences of numbers. For these sets of numbers, this observation predicts the distribution of initial digits.
The odd rule captures an interesting observation about the way numbers are distributed, and it's useful too. Benford's Law has been used as an evidence of fraud. If a sequence of numbers should be naturally occurring but Benford's Law indicates that they are not, then the sequence is likely to be fraudulent. For example, the daily balances in your bank account should follow Benford's Law, but if they don't, that may be evidence that someone is cooking the books.
