Benford’s law is a great way to quickly check if data from complex systems (obeying typically to a power law distribution over several orders of magnitude) has been tampered with.
According to this law, the first number of the dataset must follow a logarithmic law, and there must be much more ‘1’s than ‘9’s. This is contrary to intuition, and when people generate fake numbers they will tend to spread them more evenly.
In an interesting Guardian article ‘The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats’, studies are mentioned that showed that when applied to the macroeconomic data from countries, this simple test showed that Greece’s was quite questionable!
When questioning a dataset next time, use Benford’s law to easily check whether the data could be suspicious!
