Kurtosis. In other words kurtosis identifies whether the tails of a given distribution contain extreme values. There are three types of kurtosis.
Mesokurtic leptokurtic and platykurtic. For a sample of n values a method of moments estimator of the population excess kurtosis can be defined as where m 4 is the fourth sample moment about the mean m 2 is the second sample moment about the mean that is the sample variance x i is the i th value and is the sample mean. There are three types of kurtosis.
It tells us the extent to which the distribution is more or less outlier prone heavier or light tailed than the normal distribution.
Kurtosis is a measure of whether the data are heavy tailed or light tailed relative to a normal distribution. 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. Mesokurtic leptokurtic and platykurtic. It is used to determine whether a distribution contains extreme values.