Benford's law is a well known empirical statistical law that states that smaller leading digits of numerical data are more common than larger leading digits. Specifically, it states that the probability of a given data point having leading digit d is equal to log₁₀(1 + 1/d), which ranges from approximately 0.3 for d = 1 to approximately 0.045 for d = 9. This law assumes the logarithms of the data entries are uniformly distributed across several orders of magnitude, but this is not always the case. I'm just curious to know how useful it is in general, and whether there's an easy way to determine ahead of time whether or not it applies to a particular type of data. submitted by /u/dcterr [link] [comments]