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Data & Analytics · Advanced

Kurtosis

A measure of the tailedness of a distribution relative to a normal distribution.

Definition

A normal distribution has kurtosis 3 (excess kurtosis 0). Leptokurtic distributions (excess > 0) have heavy tails and more outliers, and platykurtic distributions have light tails.

Exam tip

High kurtosis = heavy tails = more extreme values than a normal distribution.

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