The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats | Ben Goldacre | Comment is free | Th... - 0 views
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The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats Using Benford's law, forensic statisticians can spot suspicious patterns in the raw numbers, and estimate the chances figures have been tampered with
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The results were fun. Greece – whose economy has tanked – showed the largest and most suspicious deviation from Benford's law of any country in the euro.
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if you go to the website testingbenfordslaw.com you'll see the proportions of each leading digit from lots of real-world datasets, graphed alongside what Benford's law predicts they should be, with data from Twitter users' follower counts to the number of books in different libraries across the US -
The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats Using Benford's law, forensic statisticians can spot suspicious patterns in the raw numbers, and estimate the chances figures have been tampered with