Benford's law and random integer decomposition with congruence stopping condition

Abstract

Benford's law is a statement about the frequency that each digit arises as the leading digit of numbers in a dataset. It is satisfied by various common integer sequences, such as the Fibonacci numbers, the factorials, and the powers of most integers. In this paper, we prove that integer sequences resulting from a random integral decomposition process (which we model as discrete “stick breaking”) subject to a certain congruence stopping condition approach Benford distribution asymptotically. We also show that our requirement on the number of congruence classes defining the congruence stopping condition is necessary for Benford behavior to occur and is a critical point; deviation from that would result in drastically different behavior.