11th May 2025 - 12 minutes read time
Benford's Law is an interesting heuristic in data analysis. It states that in any large collection of numbers that are created naturally, you should expect to see numbers starting with the number 1 about 30% of the time. The frequency distribution of numbers states that 2 should appear about 17% of the time, down to 9 being seen just 5% of the time.
It's important to understand the term "naturally created" here. Essentially, Benford's Law looks at the tendency of created numbers to span orders of magnitude. This means that numbers from company accounts, invoices, bills, or any other financial record will follow Benford's Law. These systems have numbers that are very small along side numbers that are very large and so comparing them using a logarithmic scale shows that they clump together.
