Finite-state Markov Chains Obey Benford’s Law
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A sequence of real numbers is Benford if the significands, i.e., the fraction parts in the floating-point representation of , are distributed logarithmically. Similarly, a discrete-time irreducible and aperiodic finite-state Markov chain with transition probability matrix and limiting matrix is Benford if every component of both sequences of matrices and is Benford or eventually zero. Using recent tools that established Benford behavior for finite-dimensional linear maps, via the classical theories of uniform distribution modulo 1 and Perron–Frobenius, this paper derives a simple sufficient condition (“nonresonance”) guaranteeing that , or the Markov chain associated with it, is Benford. This result in turn is used to show that almost all Markov chains are Benford, in the sense that if the transition probability matrix is chosen in an absolutely continuous manner, then the resulting Markov chain is Benford with probability one. Concrete examples illustrate the various cases that arise, and the theory is complemented with simulations and potential applications.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it