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Benford's law is extremely dubious in the field. [1] "Abstract. Is Benford's law a good instrument to detect fraud in reports of statistical and scientific dat

Benford's law is extremely dubious in the field. [1] "Abstract. Is Benford's law a good instrument to detect fraud in reports of statistical and scientific data? For a valid test, the probability of ‘false positives’ and ‘false negatives’ has to be low. However, it is very doubtful whether the Benford distribution is an appropriate tool to discriminate between manipulated and non-manipulated estimates. Further research should focus more on the validity of the test and test results should be interpreted more carefully." 1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2010.00510.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0475....

ChrisLomont 5y ago
That is not representative of "the field". Your paper, from 2010, has 21 papers citing it on the link you provided. None support the paper conclusions. The highest cited one of those, from 2019, ([1] with 172 citations) uses Benford's Law exactly as it's commonly stated and used. Here [2] is Google Scholar on Benford's Law. Of the 36,000 papers it pulled very, very few claim the law is not useful and valid. The vast majority (actually, every one of the first many pages) show how it's useful and demonstrate uses of it. If you want only recent papers, select from the left panel. Same result. In fact, the first several pages of results contain many papers showing empirical validation of the usefulness of the law. [1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2011.00542.x/html https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0475.2... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=benford+law&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=ben...