Open AccessNewcomb-Benford law analysis on COVID-19 daily infection cases and deaths in Indonesia and Malaysia
Author(s) -
W. K. Wong,
Filbert H. Juwono,
Wan Ning Loh,
Ik Ying Ngu
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
heritage and sustainable development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2712-0554
DOI - 10.37868/hsd.v3i2.53
Subject(s) - benford's law , covid-19 , demography , closeness , psychological intervention , geography , law , statistics , medicine , mathematics , sociology , political science , infectious disease (medical specialty) , pathology , mathematical analysis , disease , psychiatry
Each country has been racing to contain the spread of COVID-19. The published data of daily infection and death cases can be used to measure the effectiveness of the control interventions. We focus our study in two Southeast Asia countries: Indonesia and Malaysia during period between March and November 2020. Newcomb-Benford law has been commonly used to analyze the probabilities of the first significant digits in natural occurrences since the late 19th century. It is a prominent statistical tool for its capability to detect frauds in datasets. A chi-squared test was recruited to quantify the closeness of the data and Newcomb-Benford law distributions. The results revealed that the distributions of daily infection and death cases in Indonesia followed Newcomb-Benford law while the opposite results were obtained for Malaysia. We have done the analysis of verifying the daily COVID-19 infection and death cases in Indonesia and Malaysia using Newcomb-Benford law. It can be inferred that, between March and November 2020, the control interventions in Indonesia was less effective compared to Malaysia.