Benford's Law and Fraud Detection. Facts and Legends
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Description
Is Benford's law a good instrument to detect fraud in reports of statistical and scientific data? For a valid test the probability of "false positives" and "false negatives" has to be low. However, it is very doubtful whether the Benford distribution is an appropriate tool to discriminate between manipulated and non-manipulated estimates. Further research should focus more on the validity of the test and test results should be interpreted more carefully.
Date of Publication
2010-02-06
Publication Type
Working Paper
Language(s)
en
Contributor(s)
Diekmann, Andreas |
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Publisher
ETH Zürich
Access(Rights)
open.access