Individual_Divide333 t1_iymleaf wrote on December 2, 2022 at 2:57 PM

I immediately thought of Benford’s law Considering the months as their numbers 1, 2, 3..

“A logarithmic scale bar. Picking a random x position uniformly on this number line, roughly 30% of the time the first digit of the number will be 1. A set of numbers is said to satisfy Benford's law if the leading digit d (d ∈ {1, ..., 9}) occurs with probability[10]”

A really cool episode of Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything on Netflix, explains the law really well, and has IRS help explain (elusively) how it’s used to detect fraud in real life.

Frog23 t1_iymns43 wrote on December 2, 2022 at 3:14 PM

Benford's law doesn't apply here. It is (best) for numerical values that is spanning multiple orders of magnitude. But instead we have a fixed set of values (Jan-Dec) with no positional notation. If we were to convert the month to their numerical values and try to apply Benford' law, we would need to group the numbers for January, October, November and December to the groups of values starting with 1. That would be a bit more "benfordy", but really overshoot in other direction.

Individual_Divide333 t1_iympr1x wrote on December 2, 2022 at 3:27 PM

Ahhhhh totally makes sense. Thank you for deepening my understanding of this cool phenomenon.