Benford's Law for economic data reliability: The case of tourism flows in Sicily

This paper proposes a data science approach based on Benford's Law to analyse tourist flows – being tourism a relevant economic sector in Sicily. In particular, we are interested in detecting irregular patterns in the numerical data that may represent manipulations, inaccuracies or biases in the self-reported data from tourism organisations. The analysis is carried out by using monthly data for arrivals and overnight stays in hotels, B&Bs, and complementary accommodations in the seven provinces of the island from January 2016 to December 2019. We perform the analysis by employing several statistical tests and through a visual inspection of the difference between the empirical distributi…