Another reason natural logarithms are natural

In mathematics, log means natural logarithm by default; the burden of explanation is on anyone taking logarithms to a different base. I elaborate on this a little here.

Looking through Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill’s regression book, I noticed a justification for natural logarithms I hadn’t thought about before.

We prefer natural logs (that is, logarithms base e) because, as described above, coefficients on the natural-log scale are directly interpretable as approximate proportional differences: with a coefficient of 0.06, a difference of 1 in x corresponds to an approximate 6% difference in y, and so forth.

This is because

exp(x) ≈ 1 + x

for small values of x based on a Taylor series expansion. So in Gelman and Hill’s example, a difference of 0.06 on a natural log scale corresponds to roughly multiplying by 1.06 on the original scale, i.e. a 6% increase.

The Taylor series expansion for exponents of 10 is not so tidy:

10x ≈ 1 + 2.302585 x

where 2.302585 is the numerical value of the natural log of 10. This means that a change of 0.01 on a log10 scale corresponds to an increase of about 2.3% on the original scale.

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3 thoughts on “Another reason natural logarithms are natural

  1. Are you sure though that this is “another” reason? It seems to me this is a direct consequence of the first.

  2. Similarly the growth rate of a time-series is approximately the natural log difference, often used as a data definition. Also the standard deviation of the log approximates (depending on skewness/kurtosis) the coefficient of variation. Further, changing the logarithmic base of regression variables changes only the constant. It would be nice to see one of your excellent posts on these.

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