So, I was watching Netflix documentary series called Connected and in one of episode, narrator talked about technique, which a lot of world's tax agencies use to check if company is commiting tax fraud. This technique is called Benford's Law.
Many people guess that the odds are no different from it being any other number, so they say 10%. While there are 10 digits, 0 can't be the leftmost digit of a population. So, there are actually only 9 choices.
OK, so the odds are 1 in 9, or a probability of about 11.1%”, you might say. Surprisingly, the odds of the first digit of a randomly-chosen population, or a number representing just about any other naturally occurring quantity, being a 1 is more than 30%!
This very counter-intuitive observation is known as Benford's Law.
In this project I'm trying to test different numbers in different fields with Benford' Law proportions.
Fields:
- Politics
- Sports
- Economics
After creating this project I found out that Benford's Law is not a good measure of election's validity. For more information check out this video.
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