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Excess kurtosis, typically compared to a value of 0, characterizes the “tailedness” of a distribution. A univariate normal distribution has an excess kurtosis of 0. Negative excess kurtosis indicates a platykurtic distribution, which doesn’t necessarily have a flat top but produces fewer or less extreme outliers than the normal distribution.
This substantially unifies the treatment of discrete and continuous probability distributions. The above expression allows for determining statistical characteristics of such a discrete variable (such as the mean, variance, and kurtosis), starting from the formulas given for a continuous distribution of the probability.
One disadvantage of L-moment ratios for estimation is their typically smaller sensitivity. For instance, the Laplace distribution has a kurtosis of 6 and weak exponential tails, but a larger 4th L-moment ratio than e.g. the student-t distribution with d.f.=3, which has an infinite kurtosis and much heavier tails.
The plot of excess kurtosis as a function of the variance and the mean shows that the minimum value of the excess kurtosis (−2, which is the minimum possible value for excess kurtosis for any distribution) is intimately coupled with the maximum value of variance (1/4) and the symmetry condition: the mean occurring at the midpoint (μ = 1/2).
Most simply, they can be estimated in terms of the higher moments, using the method of moments, as in the skewness (3rd moment) or kurtosis (4th moment), if the higher moments are defined and finite. Estimators of shape often involve higher-order statistics (non-linear functions of the data), as in the higher moments, but linear estimators also ...
A fat-tailed distribution is a probability distribution that exhibits a large skewness or kurtosis, relative to that of either a normal distribution or an exponential distribution. [when defined as?] In common usage, the terms fat-tailed and heavy-tailed are sometimes synonymous; fat-tailed is sometimes also defined as a subset of heavy-tailed ...
This is analogous to the definition of kurtosis as the fourth cumulant normalized by the square of the second cumulant. The skewness is also sometimes denoted Skew[ X ]. If σ is finite and μ is finite too, then skewness can be expressed in terms of the non-central moment E[ X 3 ] by expanding the previous formula:
In probability theory and statistics, the moment-generating function of a real-valued random variable is an alternative specification of its probability distribution.Thus, it provides the basis of an alternative route to analytical results compared with working directly with probability density functions or cumulative distribution functions.