Kurtosis. Kurtosis in statistics is used to describe the distribution of the data set and depicts to what extent the data set points of a particular distribution differ from the data of a normal distribution. Kurtosis is a statistical measure used to describe the degree to which scores cluster in the tails or the peak of a frequency distribution.
Three different types of curves courtesy of investopedia are shown as follows. When a set of approximately normal data is graphed via a histogram it shows a. This greek word has the meaning arched or bulging making it an apt description of the concept known as kurtosis.
It tells us the extent to which the distribution is more or less outlier prone heavier or light tailed than the normal distribution.
Sample kurtosis definitions a natural but biased estimator. There are three types of kurtosis. In other words kurtosis identifies whether the tails of a given distribution contain extreme values. Kurtosis is defined as a normalized form of the fourth central moment of a distribution.
