A year and a day ago (which is slightly eerie) I wrote about how one Mexican blogger had used Benford’s Law to spot some unreliable data on drug-related murders being used by the UN and Mexican police. On Sunday Jialan Wang used the same technique to look at US accounting data on over 20,000 firms – and found that over
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I’m always on the lookout for practical applications of statistical analysis for doing journalism, so this piece of work by Diego Valle-Jones, on drug-related murders, made me very happy. I’ve heard of the first-digit law (also known as Benford’s law) before – it’s a way of spotting dodgy data. What Diego Valle-Jones has done is use the method to highlight
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