Applying Benford’s Law to volcanology

Abstract

The Benford’s Law predicts that the distribution of first digits of real world observations is not uniform. Instead, lower digits (1, 2, and 3) are expected to occur more frequently than higher ones (….,8,9).The use of Benford’s Law may help as a validity check on databases and the first digit rule is likely to be a common phenomenon that may provide new ways to detect inconsistent signals in datasets.v The objective of this work is to verify the conformity of three volcanology-­‐related datasets to the Benford’s Law in order to evaluate the applicability and potential utility of using such rule to assess the accuracy and reliability of volcanological databases.