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Even this explanation is incorrect. Evenly sampled data across many orders of magnitude give an even distribution of leading numbers. See my comment for code he
by jsweojtj 7y ago
Even this explanation is incorrect. Evenly sampled data across many orders of magnitude give an even distribution of leading numbers. See my comment for code here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541264
There are many distributions which do lead to the distribution of leading digits that follow Benford's law, just not uniform. Nor "uniform over several orders of magnitude".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- whack 7y ago> Thus, real-world distributions that span several orders of magnitude rather uniformly They mean uniformly on a log distribution. Ie, there are a uniform number of elements between 10^x and 10^(x+1), for many different values of x. This is best shown by the graph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Overview