Breaking the (Benford) Law

Abstract

AbstractBenford's law is seeing increasing use as a diagnostic tool for isolating pockets of large datasets with irregularities that deserve closer inspection. Popular and academic accounts of campaign finance are rife with tales of corruption, but the complete dataset of transactions for federal campaigns is enormous. Performing a systematic sweep is extremely arduous; hence, these data are a natural candidate for initial screening by comparison to Benford's distributions.KEY WORDS : Data irregularitiesData miningFECFirst-digit distributionsPolitics