How to make fake data look meaningful

Re:How to make fake data look meaningful by astine on Wednesday November 20, 2013 @03:32PM (#6770952)

You have to be careful with this though. Benford's law only holds for certain types of data, such as growing populations. It has to do with the nature of the decimal system.

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Re:How to make fake data look meaningful by Terr_ on Wednesday November 20, 2013 @05:40PM (#6771732)

To be more specific, it has to do with the nature of any positional-notation system, whether it is decimal, octal, hex, or even binary.

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Re:How to make fake data look meaningful by T-hawk on Friday November 22, 2013 @02:43PM (#6783249)

Wow, thinking about Benford's Law in binary is really interesting, thanks for this comment.

It's the most extreme expression of the concept. Every number in binary starts with 1. The only other possible leading digit would be a meaningless leading zero, so every number starts with 1. Benford's Law holds in the most extreme manner possible in binary notation, that numbers starting with 1 dominate the population over all others.

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Re:How to make fake data look meaningful by yen223 on Thursday November 21, 2013 @07:56AM (#6774429)

It has more to do with the fact that a good chunk of natural phenomenon are distributed exponentially, not linearly. Benford's Law actually applies to other notational systems.

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