The neuromuscular junction represents a relevant substrate for revealing important biophysical mechanisms of synaptic transmission. In this context, calcium ions are important in the synapse ...machinery, providing the nerve impulse transmission to the muscle fiber. In this work, we carefully investigated whether intervals of spontaneous electrical activity, recorded in seven different calcium concentrations, conform to the Newcomb-Benford Law. Our analysis revealed that electrical discharge of neuromuscular junction yields the expected values for Newcomb-Benford Law for first and second digits, for different calcium concentrations. On the other hand, first-two digits archived conformity especially for concentrations much above the physiological level. We next examined previous theoretical studies, establishing a relation between the law and lognormal and Weibull distributions. We showed that the Weibull distribution is more appropriate to fit the intervals as compared to the lognormal distribution. Altogether, the present findings strongly suggest that the electrical discharge dynamics is characterized by base-invariance and scale-invariance, being the time intervals also well described by Weibull statistics.
•Spontaneous synaptic transmission obeys the Newcomb-Benford Law.•MEPP intervals follow predicted values for the first, second, and first-two digits.•Generalized and classical Newcomb-Benford Law are adequated to study MEPP dynamics.•Time intervals of MEPPs are also described by the Weibull distribution.
We study how reliable are available data on COVID-19 cases and deaths in different countries. Our analysis is based on a modification of the law of anomalous numbers, the Newcomb–Benford law, applied ...to the daily number of deaths and new cases in each country. We first revisit the Newcomb–Benford law and show how to avoid false negative compliance with the data. We then compare the χ2 statistics deviation from this law to a number of social and economic indices for each country by computing the Spearman rank-order correlation between them and the χ2 deviation. We considered the proportion of excess deaths for those countries with sufficient available data for a good estimate and obtained similar results: less democratic, less transparent, and more corrupt countries tend to have data of lesser quality. We also discussed the limitations of the present approach and which countries the results were significant for.
The contrast of fraud in international trade is a crucial task of modern economic regulations. We develop statistical tools for the detection of frauds in customs declarations that rely on the ...Newcomb–Benford law for significant digits. Our first contribution is to show the features, in the context of a European Union market, of the traders for which the law should hold in the absence of fraudulent data manipulation. Our results shed light on a relevant and debated question, since no general known theory can exactly predict validity of the law for genuine empirical data. We also provide approximations to the distribution of test statistics when the Newcomb–Benford law does not hold. These approximations open the door to the development of modified goodness-of-fit procedures with wide applicability and good inferential properties.
•Benford law can potentially signal the validity of the underlying data used in academic papers.•Retracted articles due to concerns of misconduct significantly deviate from Benford law compared to a ...control group of non-retracted articles.•Co-authors and editors could consider employing Benford law as a screening process to highlight potential `red’ flags.
We investigate whether Benford's Law can be used to differentiate retracted academic papers that have employed fraudulent/manipulated data from other academic papers that have not been retracted. We use the case of Professor James Hunton who had 37 of his articles retracted because there were grave concerns that they contained mis-stated or fabricated datasets. We construct several Benford conformity measures, based on first significant digits contained in the articles, to determine whether Hunton's retracted papers differ significantly from a control group of non-retracted articles by competing authors. Our results clearly indicate that Hunton's retracted papers significantly deviate from Benford Law, relative to the control group of papers. In additional analysis we also find these results are generalisable to other authors with retracted papers. Our findings suggest that potentially both co-authors and journals could consider implementing a data analytical tool which employs Benford Law to highlight potential ‘red flag’ papers, with a view to decreasing the risk of fraudulent activity and thereby enhancing the credibility of academic papers and journals.
•The paper deals with the analysis of the possible manipulation of economic data.•A data science perspective is adopted, with specific focus on the Benford law.•The case of Italian regions is ...explored for the quinquennium 2007–2011.•Disparities and regularities of the data are found, and an interpretation of the results is carried out on the basis of the Italian reality.
This paper explores a real-world fundamental theme under a data science perspective. It specifically discusses whether fraud or manipulation can be observed in and from municipality income tax size distributions, through their aggregation from citizen fiscal reports. The study case pertains to official data obtained from the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance over the period 2007–2011. All Italian (20) regions are considered. The considered data science approach concretizes in the adoption of the Benford first digit law as quantitative tool. Marked disparities are found, - for several regions, leading to unexpected “conclusions”. The most eye browsing regions are not the expected ones according to classical imagination about Italy financial shadow matters.
We employ Newcomb-Benford law (NBL) to evaluate the reliability of COVID-19 figures in Brazil. Using official data from February 25 to September 15, we apply a first digit test for a national ...aggregate dataset of total cases and cumulative deaths. We find strong evidence that Brazilian reports do not conform to the NBL theoretical expectations. These results are robust to different goodness of fit (chi-square, mean absolute deviation and distortion factor) and data sources (John Hopkins University and Our World in Data). Despite the growing appreciation for evidence-based-policymaking, which requires valid and reliable data, we show that the Brazilian epidemiological surveillance system fails to provide trustful data under the NBL assumption on the COVID-19 epidemic.
•The paper deals with the analysis of the statistical regularity of a wide set of financial data.•A data science perspective is adopted, with specific focus on the Benford law.•The case of the stocks ...listed in the international financial markets is explored.•Disparities and regularities of the data are found, and an interpretation of the results is carried out on the basis of the historical facts.
This paper aims at verifying whenever the Benford's Law is valid in the context of global stock markets, which are here viewed as complex systems. In so doing, we pursue the scope of assessing the presence of data regularities and interpret obtained discrepancies.
Specifically, we check the reliability of Benford's Law for all the indexes listed on the stock exchanges of several countries, with a particular reference to prices and volumes of stocks.
To pursue our scope, we adopt comparison criteria grounded on statistical theory, like the Chi-squared test for both the distributions of the first and the second meaningful digits.
Evidence of violations is provided and some insights taken from the historical facts and economic shocks are carried out.
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