In the 30th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s learn how to uncover fraud in data.
What is in this session?
In the wake of hedge fund scams, accounting frauds and globalization, We, analysts are constantly second guessing every source of data. So how do you answer a simple question like, “am I being lied to?” while looking at a set of numbers your supplier has sent you.
Here is an email Peter, one of our readers, sent me last week:
Dear Mr. Chandoo
Shown numbers are measurements from a certain industry process. They are sent to me from a subcontractor. I have to validate these numbers. But am I being lied to? Did they make up the values themselves?
Values can be between 1 and 6 per contract. They are not necessarily normal distributed because of different batches.
That got me thinking?
That is our topic for this podcast session.
In this podcast, you will learn
- Quick announcements about 50 ways & 200k BRM
- Introduction to fraud detection
- 5 techniques for detecting fraud
- Benford’s law
- Auto correlation
- Discontinuity at zero
- Analysis of distribution
- Learning systems & decision trees
- Implementing these techniques in Excel
- A word of caution
Listen to this session
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Click here to download the MP3 file.
Links & Resources mentioned in this podcast
50 ways to analyze data course:
Fraud Analysis theory & examples
- Benford’s law
- Autocorrelation theory, example
- Discontinuity explained, usage in hedge fund scam data analysis
- Various Excel analysis models
Commonly occurring distributions
- Normal distribution
- Poisson distribution
- Exponential distribution
- Binomial distribution
Excel formulas & features to help you with fraud analysis
- SUMIFS / COUNTIFS formula
- FREQUENCY() function
- Data Analysis Toolpak (enable this free add-in from Developer > Add-ins)
- CORREL() function
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF]
How do you detect fraud?
I never had to detect fraud. So when Peter sent that email, I learned about it by researching. Based on the little I know about this field, my personal favorites are Benford’s law, distribution analysis, discontinuity at expected value.
What about you? Do you deal with data that has certain amount of fraud? How do you detect and analyze it? Please share your suggestions & tips in comments area.
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6 Responses to “Make VBA String Comparisons Case In-sensitive [Quick Tip]”
Another way to test if Target.Value equal a string constant without regard to letter casing is to use the StrCmp function...
If StrComp("yes", Target.Value, vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
' Do something
End If
That's a cool way to compare. i just converted my values to strings and used the above code to compare. worked nicely
Thanks!
In case that option just needs to be used for a single comparison, you could use
If InStr(1, "yes", Target.Value, vbTextCompare) Then
'do something
End If
as well.
Nice tip, thanks! I never even thought to think there might be an easier way.
Regarding Chronology of VB in general, the Option Compare pragma appears at the very beginning of VB, way before classes and objects arrive (with VB6 - around 2000).
Today StrComp() and InStr() function offers a more local way to compare, fully object, thus more consistent with object programming (even if VB is still interpreted).
My only question here is : "what if you want to binary compare locally with re-entering functions or concurrency (with events) ?". This will lead to a real nightmare and probably a big nasty mess to debug.
By the way, congrats for you Millions/month visits 🙂
This is nice article.
I used these examples to help my understanding. Even Instr is similar to Find but it can be case sensitive and also case insensitive.
Hope the examples below help.
Public Sub CaseSensitive2()
If InStr(1, "Look in this string", "look", vbBinaryCompare) = 0 Then
MsgBox "woops, no match"
Else
MsgBox "at least one match"
End If
End Sub
Public Sub CaseSensitive()
If InStr("Look in this string", "look") = 0 Then
MsgBox "woops, no match"
Else
MsgBox "at least one match"
End If
End Sub
Public Sub NotCaseSensitive()
'doing alot of case insensitive searching and whatnot, you can put Option Compare Text
If InStr(1, "Look in this string", "look", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
MsgBox "woops, no match"
Else
MsgBox "at least one match"
End If
End Sub