A unifying probabilistic interpretation of Benford's Law - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Uniform Distribution Theory Année : 2010

A unifying probabilistic interpretation of Benford's Law

Elise Janvresse
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  • PersonId : 970742
  • IdRef : 119868644
Rita Giuliano
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  • PersonId : 882629

Résumé

We propose a probabilistic interpretation of Benford's law, which predicts the probability distribution of all digits in everyday-life numbers. Heuristically, our point of view consists in considering an everyday-life number as a continuous random variable taking value in an interval $[0, A]$, whose maximum $A$ is itself an everyday-life number. This approach can be linked to the characterization of Benford's law by scale-invariance, as well as to the convergence of a product of independent random variables to Benford's law. It also allows to generalize Flehinger's result about the convergence of iterations of Cesaro-averages to Benford's law.
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Dates et versions

hal-00535751 , version 1 (12-11-2010)

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  • HAL Id : hal-00535751 , version 1

Citer

Elise Janvresse, Rita Giuliano. A unifying probabilistic interpretation of Benford's Law. Uniform Distribution Theory, 2010, 5 (2), pp.169-182. ⟨hal-00535751⟩
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