Benford´s Law with small sample sizes: A new exact test useful in health sciences during epidemics

Abstract

Benford or “first digit” law has been used successfully to evaluate epidemiological surveillance systems, especially during epidemics. Conventional statistical methods for evaluation (x2 and log-likelihood ratio) are controversial when the number of data is small (n <7). In this methodological note a new test is proposed to evaluate compliance with Benford’s law with small samples, which can be used with biomedical, medical and public health data.