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In statistics, the concept of the shape of a probability distribution arises in questions of finding an appropriate distribution to use to model the statistical properties of a population, given a sample from that population.
Deviations from a straight line suggest departures from normality. The plotting can be manually performed by using a special graph paper, called normal probability paper. With modern computers normal plots are commonly made with software. The normal probability plot is a special case of the Q–Q probability plot for a normal distribution.
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.
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 values γ 1 and γ 2 are the random variable's skewness and (excess) kurtosis respectively. The value(s) in each set of brackets are the terms for that level of polynomial estimation, and all must be calculated and combined for the Cornish–Fisher expansion at that level to be valid.
The first two are very similar, while the last, with one degree of freedom, has "heavier tails" meaning that the values farther away from the mean occur relatively more often (i.e. the kurtosis is higher). The Cauchy distribution is also symmetric. Skew distributions to the right. Skewness to left and right
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 ...
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 ...