IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/stapro/v80y2010i23-24p1713-1719.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Sufficient conditions for Benford's law

Author

Listed:
  • Balanzario, Eugenio P.
  • Sánchez-Ortiz, Jorge

Abstract

We present two sufficient conditions for an absolutely continuous random variable to obey Benford's law for the distribution of the first significant digit. These two sufficient conditions suggest that Benford's law will not often be observed in everyday sets of numerical data. On the other hand, we recall that there are two processes by way of which a random variable can come close to following Benford's law. The first of these is the multiplication of independent random variables and the second is the exponentiation of a random variable to a large power. Our working tool is the Poisson sum formula of Fourier analysis. Like the central limit theorem, Benford's law has an asymptotic nature.

Suggested Citation

  • Balanzario, Eugenio P. & Sánchez-Ortiz, Jorge, 2010. "Sufficient conditions for Benford's law," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 80(23-24), pages 1713-1719, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:stapro:v:80:y:2010:i:23-24:p:1713-1719
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-7152(10)00208-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David E. Giles, 2012. "Exact Asymptotic Goodness-of-Fit Testing For Discrete Circular Data, With Applications," Econometrics Working Papers 1201, Department of Economics, University of Victoria.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:stapro:v:80:y:2010:i:23-24:p:1713-1719. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622892/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.