Aug 30, 2016

Benford's Law Graphed in R

Using R to replicate Sara Silverstein's post at BusinessInsider.com


A first-year student near and dear to my heart at the Kellogg School of Management thought I would be interested in this Business Insider story by Sara Silverstein on Benford’s Law. After sitting through the requisite ad, I became engrossed in Ms. Silverstein’s talk about what that law theoretically is and how it can be applied in financial forensics.

I thought I would try duplicating the demonstration in R.1 This gave me a chance to compare and contrast the generation of combined bar- and line-plots using base R and ggplot2. It also gave me an opportunity to learn how to post RMarkdown output to blogger.

Using base R

Define the Benford Law function using log base 10 and plot the predicted values.
benlaw <- function(d) log10(1 + 1 / d)
digits <- 1:9
baseBarplot <- barplot(benlaw(digits), names.arg = digits, xlab = "First Digit", 
                       ylim = c(0, .35))
Remarks:
  • That was easy!

Aug 11, 2016

Forking, Cloning, and Pull Requests with Github Desktop

This is the best explanation I've found of how to collaborate on someone else's repository. Bonus! it's a video: