<h1 id="benfords-law">Benfords Law<a aria-hidden="true" class="anchor-heading icon-link" href="#benfords-law"></a></h1>
<p>The idea is that if you take some set of number data and chop off all numbers after the first one, you will have a predictable distribution of numbers</p>
<ul>
<li>ex. take a large list of airline prices over the course of a year.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/assets/images/2021-04-11-20-47-22.png"></p>
<p>What this curve shows is that ~30% of the numbers will start with a <code>1</code>, ~17% with a <code>2</code>, and so on.</p>
<h4 id="use-in-discovery-of-enron-fraud">Use in discovery of Enron fraud<a aria-hidden="true" class="anchor-heading icon-link" href="#use-in-discovery-of-enron-fraud"></a></h4>
<p>In an analysis of Enron, it was found that the numbers they reported did not follow the expected curve.</p>
<h4 id="social-media-bots">Social Media Bots<a aria-hidden="true" class="anchor-heading icon-link" href="#social-media-bots"></a></h4>
<p>If you analyze friend count among users, you will see a distribution that follows Benford's Law</p>
<ul>
<li>ex. I have 233 friends (2), you have 125 (1), and so on... the observations will follow Benford's Law distribution.</li>
</ul>
<p>This fact has been used to uncover bots who do not have natural friend counts.</p>
<h4 id="elections">Elections<a aria-hidden="true" class="anchor-heading icon-link" href="#elections"></a></h4>
<p>Interestingly, an election where people vote their conscience results in a curve that follows the distribution pattern. However, elections add a degree of complexity, in that humans will vote for someone who is not their first choice if they think that candidate will lose. This disturbs the resulting curve, and as a result will be a curve that is a skewed version of a expected curve.</p>

Benfords Law

thoughts-on


Welcome to my Second Brain! Here you'll find thoughts, lessons, facts and any other interesting musings that I've come across or thought up over the years. A lot of what I have gathered is originally from the minds of others, while some of it originates from myself. Some notes may contain misinformation, though I try to be rigorous with my additions.

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This Dendron notebook is the sister vault to the tech-focused [Digital Garden](https://tech.kyletycholiz.com)

## Tags
Throughout the Second Brain, I have made use of tags, which give semantic meaning to the pieces of information.

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## Resources
### UE (Unexamined) Resources
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### Resources
This heading is for inexhaustible resources. 
- A prime example would be a quality website that continually posts articles- another example would be a tool, such as software that measures frequencies in a room to help acoustically treat it.
