At 12:26 15/07/2013 +0000, Toki "Jonathan" Kantoor wrote:
On 07/14/2013 09:54 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
However, Benford's law is about the *first* digit of a wide variety
of numbers.
First three digits, not first digit. The fourth and subsequent
digits should be uniformly distributed.
The striking thing about variates that follow Benford's Law is indeed
that the initial digits are not equally distributed. But such
variates don't stop being what they are after some arbitrary number
of significant figures - whether it be one, three, or any other. The
values come from the distribution - so all their decimal digits are
part of the story.
If you want values that follow Benford's Law up to three digits, you
can easily take the true values from my suggested formula, truncate
(or round?) them after three digits, and add further random digits
selected from a uniform distribution.
But I'm not at all sure why you would want to do this. Does the
source of this suggestion mean merely that, although the early digits
are not uniformly distributed, later ones are more nearly so - and
that there is little point in worrying about the difference after,
say, three digits? If so, there is equally no point in worrying that
these later digits might be too right!
Brian Barker
--
To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
