31–40 of 96 posts
I don't buy it. My intuition here is that Benford's law is a thing because for pretty much any statistical distribution, large numbers are less likely than small numbers, and small numbers are more likely to start with 1. But I'd only expect this effect to show up when aggregating across many different statistical distributions (e.g. looking at all stocks in the S&P 500 at once) rather than looking at individual dist…
It should be obvious that violating Benfords law isn't evidence of fraud or manipulation or even fomo, just evidence that the price is impacted by the people typing in the orders having to pick what number to type in.
Edit: I've softened the language in my comment a bit, but I stand by the fact that this only shows humans are affecting prices, this analysis can't distinguish between fraud and psychological effects around "key" prices, like $10,000.
What is the statistical likelihood of this appearing by chance? Note that 2014 to today isn't actually that long of a timeframe, as prices in a time-series are highly linked to the previous data point. Berkshire Hathaway has been trading for several decades; so that's 40 years of data; as compared to 7 years of data. yet the author, by using the same charts, seems to falsely imply that these are remotely comparable.…
The author at statsmodeling.stat.columbia.edu is the person who wrote several of the books on things like this. I don't think he can be finger-wagged away quite so easily as that. There's a huge difference between this and the election one, which is that this one is working with data that satisfies the key statistical assumptions needed to properly apply Benford's Law, and the QAnon elections rigged claims didn't. (O…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The currency against which BTC is exchanged the most is very likely the one that shows the best fit (most perfect market). Assuming that currency is the USD I expect any other currency would result is an even worst fit
Presumably yen, being a smaller unit of money, would have the prices spread out over more logs. So Benford's law might be a better fit.
I don't buy it. My intuition here is that Benford's law is a thing because for pretty much any statistical distribution, large numbers are less likely than small numbers, and small numbers are more likely to start with 1. But I'd only expect this effect to show up when aggregating across many different statistical distributions (e.g. looking at all stocks in the S&P 500 at once) rather than looking at individual dist…
I don't really know anything about this but every time I read these analyses using Benford's Law I don't understand why anyone would expect Bitcoin's exchange rate to begin with the digit "1" ~30% of the time. Once you're not talking about human-guestimated numbers, it seems more like a question of scale factors. If bitcoin's value fluctuates between 30k and 70k it's never going to start with a "1". Or if its value f…
Benfords law is used to find evidence that the numbers came from a person, not a measurement or mathematical process, right? So anyone who knows what a limit order is should not be surprised to find evidence that humans are involved in picking the prices, right? It should be obvious that violating Benfords law isn't evidence of fraud or manipulation or even fomo, just evidence that the price is impacted by the people…
Benfords law is used to find evidence that the numbers came from a person, not a measurement or mathematical process, right? So anyone who knows what a limit order is should not be surprised to find evidence that humans are involved in picking the prices, right? It should be obvious that violating Benfords law isn't evidence of fraud or manipulation or even fomo, just evidence that the price is impacted by the people…
What is the statistical likelihood of this appearing by chance? Note that 2014 to today isn't actually that long of a timeframe, as prices in a time-series are highly linked to the previous data point. Berkshire Hathaway has been trading for several decades; so that's 40 years of data; as compared to 7 years of data. yet the author, by using the same charts, seems to falsely imply that these are remotely comparable.…
The author at statsmodeling.stat.columbia.edu is the person who wrote several of the books on things like this. I don't think he can be finger-wagged away quite so easily as that. There's a huge difference between this and the election one, which is that this one is working with data that satisfies the key statistical assumptions needed to properly apply Benford's Law, and the QAnon elections rigged claims didn't. (O…
A formal justification for applying Benford's law to a time series like that would depend on some kind of ergodicity argument which has not been made either by Gelman or the original author of the post he's talking about. I'm rather skeptical.
As a first step into deciding whether it's reasonable I would do something like the plot for Berkshire Hathaway for each of a large collection of companies, and collect some measure of disagreement between the model (Benford's law) and the observed distribution for each stock. I'm guessing many of these stocks would follow Benford's law no better than Bitcoin.
What is the statistical likelihood of this appearing by chance? Note that 2014 to today isn't actually that long of a timeframe, as prices in a time-series are highly linked to the previous data point. Berkshire Hathaway has been trading for several decades; so that's 40 years of data; as compared to 7 years of data. yet the author, by using the same charts, seems to falsely imply that these are remotely comparable.…
The author at statsmodeling.stat.columbia.edu is the person who wrote several of the books on things like this. I don't think he can be finger-wagged away quite so easily as that. There's a huge difference between this and the election one, which is that this one is working with data that satisfies the key statistical assumptions needed to properly apply Benford's Law, and the QAnon elections rigged claims didn't. (O…
Sorry for the shameless plug. I made a video about Benford's law a while ago for anybody wondering how we get these values https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hY43XpVr1I&ab_channel=Treen...
I suspect your "shameless plug" message is trying to draw attention away from the fact that you've added an adblock whitelisting query param to the url, presumably whitelisting ads from certain providers. This is more unethical than sharing tracking links in here.
Anyway, it's not a big deal, ads aren't worse than tracking, and anyone who uses a real blocker uBlock Origin isn't affected by ab_channel.