Advances in Data Analysis and Classification 3, pp. 281-290.
ISSN/ISBN: Not available at this time. DOI: 10.1007/s11634-009-0048-5
Abstract: Digit distributions are a popular tool for the detection of tax payers’ noncompliance and other fraud. In the early stage of digital analysis, Nigrini and Mittermaier (A J Pract Theory 16(2):52–67, 1997) made use of Benford’s Law (Benford in Am Philos Soc 78:551–572, 1938) as a natural reference distribution. A justification of that hypothesis is only known for multiplicative sequences (Schatte in J Inf Process Cyber EIK 24:443–455, 1988). In applications, most of the number generating processes are of an additive nature and no single choice of ‘an universal first-digit law’ seems to be plausible (Scott and Fasli in Benford’s law: an empirical investigation and a novel explanation. CSM Technical Report 349, Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/technical-reports/2001/CSM-349.pdf, 2001). In that situation, some practioneers (e.g. financial authorities) take recourse to a last digit analysis based on the hypothesis of a Laplace distribution. We prove that last digits are approximately uniform for distributions with an absolutely continuous distribution function. From a practical perspective, that result, of course, is only moderately interesting. For that reason, we derive a result for ‘certain’ sums of lattice-variables as well. That justification is provided in terms of stationary distributions.
Bibtex:
@Article{,
author="Dlugosz, Stephan and M{\"u}ller-Funk, Ulrich",
title="The value of the last digit: statistical fraud detection with digit analysis",
journal="Advances in Data Analysis and Classification",
year="2009",
volume="3",
number="3",
pages="281--290",
issn="1862-5355",
doi="10.1007/s11634-009-0048-5",
}
Reference Type: Journal Article
Subject Area(s): Accounting, Probability Theory