Deviation from Benfords law and identification of author peculiarities in texts

Abstract

The distribution of the first significant digit in numerals of connected texts is considered. Benford's law is found to hold approximately for them. Deviations from Benford's law are statistically significant author peculiarities that allow, under certain conditions, to distinguish between parts of the text with a different authorship.

Keywords

• Benford’s law
• Statistical hypothesis testing
• Mann–Whitney U-test