Benford’s Law to Detect Fake Data

Mathematics often reveals intriguing patterns in our day-to-day lives, and one such phenomenon is Benford’s law. This law describes the surprising but simple pattern observed in real-life data. When dealing with diverse data sets such as currency amounts, population sizes, or building heights, the range of values can be wide. One would expect to find an even distribution of first digits ranging from 1 to 9. However, Benford’s law shows that this is not the case. The probability of finding the digit 1 as the first digit is relatively high (around 30%), while the probability of the other digits as…