Classes of probability measures built on the properties of Benford’s law

Abstract

Benford’s law is a particular discrete probability distribution that is often satisfied by the significant digits of a dataset. The nonconformity with Benford’s law suggests the possible presence of data manipulation. This paper introduces two novel generalized versions of Benford’s law that are less restrictive than the original Benford’s law—hence, leading to more probable conformity of a given dataset. Such generalizations are grounded on the existing mathematical relations between Benford’s law probability distribution elements. Moreover, one of them leads to a set of probability distributions that is a proper subset of that of the other one. We show that the considered versions of Benford’s law have a geometric representation on the three-dimensional Euclidean space. Through suitable optimization models, we show that all the probability distributions satisfying the more restrictive generalization exhibit at least acceptable conformity with Benford’s law, according to the most popular distance measures. We also present some examples to highlight the practical usefulness of the introduced devices.