Saturday, December 19, 2009

Benford's law

This is the probabilistic law that rules the distribution of de digits that appear in for example, our bills, bank statements, national debts, ..., where the digit 1 is seen as the most probable.

The reason of this counter-intuitive law is that the natural underlying distribution is logarithmic. Benford's law

When probabilities are involved, our intuition may catastrophically lead us to wrong conclusions.

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