A Benford's law based method for fraud detection using R Library.

ABSTRACT: Benford Law (BL) states that the occurrence of significant digits in many natural and human phenomena data sets are not uniformly scattered, as one could naively expect, but follow a logarithmic-type distribution. Here, we present a method that consists of the use of BL analysis over first and first-two digits, three statistical conformity tests - Z-statistics, Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) and Chi-square (χ2) as well as the summation test which looks for excessively large numbers, having fraud detection as one of its application. We developed the method for fraud detection in the case of the Brazilian Bolsa Familia welfare program. In this case, we submitted four periods of Brazilian welfare program payments to the method with a dataset of 13,442,529 records. We provide a practical implem

SUBMITTER: Azevedo CDS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8720889 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature