Benford's law, Fraud Magazine
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Blazing a trail for the Benford's Law of words, part 2

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Date: May 1, 2016
Read Time: 12 mins

In part 2, the author applies his unique letter analytic techniques to a variety of examples, including keyword searches and predictive analysis using benchmark data. The aim? Finding fraud in the words.

In part 1 of this article in the March/April issue, we transitioned from our number-focused tendencies to the new perspective of investigating for possible fraud in text, which accounts for the majority of data. Via letter analytics — a term I coined in my Lanza Approach to Letter Analytics (LALA)™ — I provided a swift means to analyze texts in current and previous periods, compare them to an English-language benchmark and understand anomalies. The trick for speeding a review is to focus on the first and last few characters in words, which facilitates trending and isolates change more easily.

Here we'll focus on specific research case studies studying letter analytics: (1) over time for deviations (2) for patterns displayed by specific authors and in (3) improving the scope and speed of keyword search reviews.

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