St. Petersburg Data Science Meetup #3July, 3rd, 2015

Benford’s law & fraud detection

D is FSD aka first significant digit

Many usages:accounting fraudelection resultsscientific fraudand ...

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.04387v1.pdf

in social networks

Twitter data: compute FSD distribution on users’ egocentric networksTotal: 20988 users91% had a correlation 0.9 or higher170 users had < 0.5168 - Russian bots, 2 - valid users

More: http://www.benfordonline.net/

Benford’s Law Strikes Back: No Simple Explanation in Sight for Mathematical Gemhttp://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1074&context=rgp_rsr

Benford's Law: Theory and Applicationshttp://press.princeton.edu/titles/10527.html

Benford's Law: Applications for Forensic Accounting, Auditing, and Fraud Detectionhttp://www.amazon.com/Benfords-Law-Applications-Accounting-Detection/dp/1118152859

First page image credits: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arballoimages/License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Figure at the 3rd page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#/media/File:Benfords_law_illustrated_by_world%27s_countries_population.pngLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/