Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with Python

Kurtosis

We have already discussed normal distribution. Do you remember the bell-shaped graph? If not, just check out the first section of this chapter again. You may well ask yourself, why should you remember that? It is necessary in order to understand the concept of kurtosis. Basically, kurtosis is a statistical measure that illustrates how heavily the tails of distribution differ from those of a normal distribution. This technique can identify whether a given distribution contains extreme values.

But hold on, isn't that similar to what we do with skewness? Not really. Skewness typically measures the symmetry of the given distribution. On the other hand, kurtosis measures the heaviness of the distribution tails.

Kurtosis, unlike skewness, ...