Statistics - Kurtosis (Distribution Tail extremity)
Table of Contents
1 - About
kurtosis is seen as measure of the “peakedness” of a distribution but it seems that it is not.
Kurtosis tells you virtually nothing about the shape of the peak - its only unambiguous interpretation is in terms of tail extremity; i.e., either existing outliers (for the sample kurtosis) or propensity to produce outliers (for the kurtosis of a probability distribution). See Kurtosis as Peakedness, 1905 – 2014. R.I.P., Peter H. WESTFALL
Distributions with negative or positive excess kurtosis are called:
- platykurtic distributions
- or leptokurtic distributions
respectively.
