Evidence map›Paper›PMID 27018999›Full record

ArticlePloS one2016

Assessing Conformance with Benford's Law: Goodness-Of-Fit Tests and Simultaneous Confidence Intervals.

M Lesperance, W J Reed, M A Stephens, C Tsao, B Wilton

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in PloS one, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
4citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

4 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Article
  3. Article
  4. Benchmarking of public health surveillance of COVID-19 in Colombia: First semesterBiomedica : revista del Instituto Nacional de Salud · 2020
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors.

M LesperanceDepartment of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada.
W J ReedDepartment of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada.
M A StephensSimon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada.
C TsaoDepartment of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada.
B WiltonCamosun College, Victoria, Canada.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Benford's Law is a probability distribution for the first significant digits of numbers, for example, the first significant digits of the numbers 871 and 0.22 are 8 and 2 respectively. The law is particularly remarkable because many types of data are considered to be consistent with Benford's Law and scientists and investigators have applied it in diverse areas, for example, diagnostic tests for mathematical models in Biology, Genomics, Neuroscience, image analysis and fraud detection. In this article we present and compare statistically sound methods for assessing conformance of data with Benford's Law, including discrete versions of Cramér-von Mises (CvM) statistical tests and simultaneous confidence intervals. We demonstrate that the common use of many binomial confidence intervals leads to rejection of Benford too often for truly Benford data. Based on our investigation, we recommend that the CvM statistic Ud(2), Pearson's chi-square statistic and 100(1 - α)% Goodman's simultaneous confidence intervals be computed when assessing conformance with Benford's Law. Visual inspection of the data with simultaneous confidence intervals is useful for understanding departures from Benford and the influence of sample size.

Indexed as

Models, TheoreticalConfidence IntervalsDatabases, GeneticGenomicsOpen Reading FramesProbabilitySample Size

Identifiers

PMID27018999
PMCPMC4809611

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.