What is the difference between skewness and kurtosis?
Skewness and kurtosis are both important measures of a distribution’s shape.
- Skewness measures the asymmetry of a distribution.
- Kurtosis measures the heaviness of a distribution’s tails relative to a normal distribution.
What are the three categories of kurtosis?
The three categories of kurtosis are:
- Mesokurtosis: An excess kurtosis of 0. Normal distributions are mesokurtic.
- Platykurtosis: A negative excess kurtosis. Platykurtic distributions are thin-tailed, meaning that they have few outliers.
- Leptokurtosis: A positive excess kurtosis. Leptokurtic distributions are fat-tailed, meaning that they have many outliers.
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Turney, S. (2024, January 29). What Is Kurtosis? | Definition, Examples & Formula. Scribbr. Retrieved March 17, 2025, from https://www.scribbr.com/statistics/kurtosis/
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