Abstract

VALDEZ BLANCO, Dindo. Benford's Law and Covid-19 data in Bolivia. Revista Varianza [online]. 2021, n.18, pp. 72-77. ISSN 9876-6789.

Abstract At present, with the data from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is doubt in believing that states or governments are reporting reliable and accurate data. In Bolivia, in particular, the same happens, given that the health system is precarious, the information reported to date is doubted, both in new daily cases, daily cases recovered and deaths, as well as in accumulated data. Therefore, the objective of the research work is to document whether these data sets reported by the country 's health system follow Benford's law. The work methodology is based on the procedure of a goodness-of-fit research study, since it involves the use of two goodness-of-fit tests called the Chi-square Goodness-of-Fit test and the Kuiper goodness-of-fit test. The data collected comes from the daily reports of the Ministry of Health of the Plurinational State of Bolivia between April 1, 2020 and July 14, 2021. To determine if the first significant digit of the daily number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Bolivia conforms to Benford's law of probability, Pearson's Chi-square goodness-of-fit tests and Kuiper's test are performed, in both cases the hypothesis that the data conform to Benford's law is rejected, the diíference being more significant large is with the digit 1, this fact suggests that there is an underestimation in the daily reports of confirmed cases

Keywords : Goodness of Fit; Chi Square Test; Kuiper Test; Data analysis.