Discussion summary
A discussion on an interactive tool for Benford's Law and its applications in detecting irregularities, including finance and cryptos, with historical context and AI considerations.
What the discussion says
- Benford's Law can be used to identify irregularities in datasets.
- Some believe fraudsters may now evade detection with sophisticated methods.
- The law has historical roots dating back to 1881 and is used in various fields.
“Benford’s Law was first discovered with logarithm tables in 1881.”
“It's interesting how all base 10 numbers identify as non binary.”
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- Hacker News
- I wonder if it using this would help disprove election irregularities?
- It's interesting how all base 10 numbers identify as non binary
- Interesting topic, shame about the LLM phrasing.by sorokod
- I learned about Benford's law over a decade ago, and I always found it beautiful and elegant. But surely, fraudsters have become more sophisticated by now. I wonder if you asked an AI to commit fraud, if it would be clever enough to avoid such mistakes.by deanalyzer
- Interesting that it was first discovered with noticing the “garden path” in the front pages of a book of logarithm tables (in 1881).by cwmoore
- I once did an application of Benford's Law to USDT transactions between crypto exchanges, which seemed to indicate some exchanges had mostly "organic" transactions and a handful of exchanges seemed to have heavy transaction volume of seemingly-random but not really random amounts, indicating some level of wash trading on those exchanges.by jboggan
- Neat! Benford’s Law was the first topic I dove into in undergrad math that got a minor publication. Given how well known it is for forensic accounting I’ve always wanted to look into convictions and see if the “average” fraudster has wised up and produces more realistic distributions.
- i suppose that nowadays analysts have more sophisticated tests?
in any case, for any set of statistical tests, it's relatively trivial to produce data that passes all of them
- Could look up convictions and see how any county courthouse delivers sentences, Bendord’s Law isn’t just for accounting, it’s for anything numeric.by cwmoore
- I'd recommend allowing 2 digit exploration. I've used it in the past when analyzing hard drive failure logical block addresses.by jmpman
- benford's law is used to detect whether data is faked
in which ways would the list of hdd bad blocks be faked?