Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The skewness value can be positive, zero, negative, or undefined. For a unimodal distribution (a distribution with a single peak), negative skew commonly indicates that the tail is on the left side of the distribution, and positive skew indicates that the tail is on the right. In cases where one tail is long but the other tail is fat, skewness ...
In statistics and probability theory, the nonparametric skew is a statistic occasionally used with random variables that take real values. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It is a measure of the skewness of a random variable's distribution —that is, the distribution's tendency to "lean" to one side or the other of the mean .
Roughly speaking, a distribution has positive skew (right-skewed) if the higher tail is longer, and negative skew (left-skewed) if the lower tail is longer. Perfectly symmetrical distributions always have zero skewness, though zero skewness does not necessarily imply a symmetrical distribution.
Normal probability plot of a sample from a right-skewed distribution – it has an inverted C shape. Histogram of a sample from a right-skewed distribution – it looks unimodal and skewed right. This is a sample of size 50 from a uniform distribution, plotted as both a histogram, and a normal probability plot.
The exponentially modified normal distribution is another 3-parameter distribution that is a generalization of the normal distribution to skewed cases. The skew normal still has a normal-like tail in the direction of the skew, with a shorter tail in the other direction; that is, its density is asymptotically proportional to for some positive .
where is the beta function, is the location parameter, > is the scale parameter, < < is the skewness parameter, and > and > are the parameters that control the kurtosis. and are not parameters, but functions of the other parameters that are used here to scale or shift the distribution appropriately to match the various parameterizations of this distribution.
The asymmetric generalized normal distribution can be used to model values that may be normally distributed, or that may be either right-skewed or left-skewed relative to the normal distribution. The skew normal distribution is another distribution that is useful for modeling deviations from normality due to skew.
This Wikipedia entry speaks about "a distribution has positive skew (right-skewed) if the right (higher value) tail is longer and negative skew (left-skewed) if the left (lower value) tail is longer". To my opinion skewness has nothing to do with the size of either tail, but more with the 'weight' associated with the tail.