Concept information
Preferred term
kurtosis
Definition
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In probability theory and statistics, kurtosis (from Greek: 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 a particular aspect of a probability distribution. There are different ways to quantify kurtosis for a theoretical distribution, and there are corresponding ways of estimating it using a sample from a population. Different measures of kurtosis may have different interpretations.
The standard measure of a distribution's kurtosis, originating with Karl Pearson, is a scaled version of the fourth moment of the distribution. This number is related to the tails of the distribution, not its peak; hence, the sometimes-seen characterization of kurtosis as "peakedness" is incorrect. For this measure, higher kurtosis corresponds to greater extremity of deviations (or outliers), and not the configuration of data near the mean.
(Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurtosis)
Broader concept
Entry terms
- fourth moment
In other languages
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French
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coefficient d’acuité
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coefficient d’aplatissement
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moment d'ordre 4
URI
http://data.loterre.fr/ark:/67375/PSR-LTKB5RKV-M
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