Benford’s Law—Information Analysis and Business Performance Management Benford’s Law—Information Analysis and Business Performance Management: "Sometimes what people perceive to be the truth is less than consistent with reality. In the business intelligence world, situations like these often present opportunities for discovery that lead directly to actionable knowledge. One example is a curious observation (in the 1920s) by a General Electric physicist named Frank Benford that led to his description of a counter-intuitive law of logarithmic sizes associated with numeric distributions. This law, which is now referred to as “Benford’s Law,” states that in data value sets with certain properties, there is a predictable, albeit, uneven distribution of the initial digits of numbers within the set. In other words, in some number distributions, if you analyzed the frequency of the leftmost digit of all the numbers, you are much more likely to find the digit ‘1’ than any other digit, followed by ‘2,’ then ‘3’,’ etc.

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