Skewness And Kurtosis Definition. Many books say that these two statistics give you insights into the shape of the distribution. Kurtosis tells you the height and sharpness of the central peak relative to that of a standard bell curve.
Variability of a data set. A further characterization of the data includes skewness and kurtosis. Here x is the sample mean.
Because it is the fourth moment kurtosis is always positive.
Skewness is a measure of the symmetry in a distribution. Here x is the sample mean. Skewness is a measure of symmetry or more precisely the lack of symmetry. Skewness is a measure of the degree of lopsidedness in the frequency distribution.