What is Benford’s Law?

Benford’s Law states that the leading digit is usually small in many real-world cases. It is seen that the leading digit is usually either 1 or 2. So as the value of the digit increases the chance of utilizing that very digit becomes small. It is seen that the chance of number 1 appearing as the leading digit is about 30.1% whereas for 9 it is about 4.6%.

Before writing about the law, let us have a quick look at some situations. We use numbers to keep count of entities. For instance, consider the number of followers on X(formerly known as Twitter). Some have 120000 followers, some have 3000 followers. Here in this, the leading digits are 1 and 3. Also, we all know that each number carries equal weight and nine digits can be used as leading digits. So the chance or Probability of occurrence of each digit is 1/9 or 11.11% for the leading digit. However, this is not applicable in real-world scenarios.

Benford’s Law is one of the fundamental laws of mathematics that states, “In a large dataset, approximately 30% of numbers start with a 1 while less than 5% start with a 9.”

In this article, we have covered, Benford’s Law definition, formula, examples and others in detail.