by a coincidence [process well described in this xkcd’s comics] i’ve stumbled on the definition of Benford’s law. since i have access to quite a lot of different economic & financial data i’ve decided to check if that law applies also to it.
i’ve run small php script that checked over 6M of the time series, 2.8 billion data points and got following results:
0 ******************* 393035420 1 **************************************** 790481134 2 ******************** 405428774 3 ************** 277812594 4 *********** 226251500 5 ********* 189978617 6 ******* 154348863 7 ****** 128284078 8 ***** 113745540 9 ****** 128609876
pretty neat. the data i have access to is well behaved and obeys that law [except observations starting with 9]