Application of Benford’s Law in Analyzing Geotechnical Data

Abstract

Benford’s law predicts the frequency of the first digit of numbers met in a wide range of naturally occurring phenomena. In data sets, following Benford’s law, numbers are started with a small leading digit more often than those with a large leading digit. This law can be used as a tool for detecting fraud and abnormally in the number sets and any fabricated number sets. This can be used as an effective tool for processing data sets from laboratory tests, site investigation tests data, geotechnical design (both financial and technical) in engineering and specially included in geotechnical engineering and, etc. In this paper, data sets from geotechnical data are gathered and analyzed. It is shown that most of them follow Benford’s law. Therefore, we can use this observation for similar applications to detect the validity of data. Also, this can be assumed as an evidence for natural numbers that follow Benford’s law.