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Zdraveski, D, Janeska, M and Avramovski, P (2022)

Determination of the Reliability of Covid-19 Data in the Republic of North Macedonia Using Benford’s law

EC Pulmonology and Respiratory Medicine 11(1), pp. 31-46.

ISSN/ISBN: Not available at this time. DOI: Not available at this time.



Abstract:  Coronavirus or COVID-19 is a highly contagious and pathogenic viral infection caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coro- navirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which has caused a global pandemic that has led to dramatic loss of human life worldwide. The accuracy and indisputability of Covid-19 data should be one of the basic principles of the Institute of Public Health and the Ministry of Health in every national economy. These attributes are achieved through the use of validated method for collection and processing data, attested procedures, and balanced calculations using all available sources of information. Benford’s law is used to detect anomalies in the large amounts of data. The basic premise is that when the distribution of lead- ing digits in a data set differs significantly from the expected distribution under Benford’s law, this anomaly may be an indication of fraud or manipulation. Thus, Benford’s Law is an important control mechanism that can contribute to increase of data integrity and information quality. The purpose of this paper was to understand the realiability of Covid-19 data regarding the number of tests per day, the number of positive cases, the number of deaths and the number of healed persons published by the Institute of Public Health in Republic of North Macedonia. In this paper was examined reliability of data by applying Benford’s law and the corresponding tests to assess the compliance of the distribution of the leading digits of this data with the distribution of the same according to Benford’s law. The presence of anomalies in the reports from the Center for Public Health will be identified through five tests: z-statistics, MAD-Mean absolute deviation test, χ 2 - test, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Kuiper test. Microsoft Excel will be used to analyze the data.


Bibtex:
@article{, author = {Dejan Zdraveski and Margarita Janeska and Petar Avramovski}, title = {Determination of the Reliability of Covid-19 Data in the Republic of North Macedonia Using Benford’s law}, year = {2022}, journal = {EC Pulmonology and Respiratory Medicine}, volume = {11}, number = {1}, pages = {31--46}, url = {https://www.ecronicon.com/ecprm/pdf/ECPRM-11-00903.pdf}, }


Reference Type: Journal Article

Subject Area(s): Medical Sciences