Measures Of Kurtosis In Statistics. Kurtosis is a measure of whether the data are heavy tailed or light tailed relative to a normal distribution. Skewness tells you the amount and direction of skew departure from horizontal symmetry and kurtosis tells you how tall and sharp the central peak is.
Kurtosis is useful in statistics for making inferences for example as to financial risks in an investment. κυρτός kyrtos or kurtos meaning curved arching is a measure of the tailedness of the probability distribution of a real valued random variable like skewness kurtosis describes the shape of a probability distribution and there are different ways of quantifying it for a theoretical distribution and corresponding ways of. Data sets with low kurtosis tend to have light tails or lack of outliers.
In statistics we use the kurtosis measure to describe the tailedness of the distribution as it describes the shape of it.
Three different types of curves courtesy of investopedia are shown as follows. Therefore the measure of kurtosis is related to the tails of the distribution not its peak. The standard measure of kurtosis is based on a scaled version of the fourth moment of the data or population. Definition of kurtosis like skewness kurtosis is a statistical measure that is used to describe distribution.
