benfords-law

I have a quick question. I am trying to make a fraud detection app in java, the app will be primarily based on Benford's law. Benford's law is super cool, it basically can be interpreted to say that in a real financial transaction the first digit is commonly a 1, 2, or 3 and very rarely an 8, 9. I haven't been able to get the Benford formula translated into code that can be run in Java. http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath302/kmath302.htm This link has more information about what the Benford law is and how it can be used. I know that I will have to use the java math class to be able to use a

I read a text file and put the data into an ArrayList of String . The data is like China 12351235123 Korea 123532523 USA 12341235123 I just need those integer data as an integer to find the first digit of the integers. I know how to find the first digit, but I don't know how I can pick up only the integer data. ttivedcm I am assuming that your ArrayList is of type String . replaceAll() will take out anything that isn't a number(0-9) ArrayList<String> countrys = new ArrayList<String>(); countrys.add("China 12351235123"); countrys.add("Korea 123532523"); countrys.add("USA 12341235123"); for

Python has a number of ways to generate different distributions of random numbers, see the documentation for the random module . Unfortunately they aren't terribly understandable without the appropriate math background, especially considering the required parameters. I'd like to know if any of those methods are capable of producing random numbers with a distribution that obeys Benford's Law , and what parameter values are appropriate. Namely for a population of integers, those integers should start with a '1' about 30% of the time, '2' about 18% of the time, etc. Using Jan Dvorak's answer I