Statistical methods for decision support systems in finance: how Benford’s law predicts financial risk
本文研究本福特定律在金融投资决策中的应用，发现市场指数日收益率与本福特定律的偏差可预测短期风险与趋势，卡方检验的p值对市场平均收益和风险水平有预测能力。
Abstract This paper merges the statistical analysis of data regularities and decision support systems for investors. Specifically, it discusses the Benford’s law as a decision support device for financial investments. In particular, we illustrate the role of such a property of financial data as risk predictor for financial markets. First of all, we show empirical evidence of accordance between data on market index daily returns and Benford’s law. Then, we highlight that on short time period (1 year) the deviations from Benford’s law are related to low risk and positive trend periods; the p value of the $$\chi ^2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>χ</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msup> </mml:math> test against the Benford’s distribution displays some predicting power for the market average return and risk level.