Understanding Skewness

A perfectly symmetrical data set will have a skewness of 0. Therefore, the normal distribution has a skewness of 0.

-0.5 < skewness < 0.5, the data are fairly symmetrical.

-1 < skewness < — 0.5 or 0.5 < skewness < 1, the data are moderately skewed

- 1 < skewness or skewness < -1, the data are highly skewed

Kurtosis describes how peaked the curve is. First, it sees whether the data are heavy-tailed (fat) or light-tailed relative to a normal distribution(the tallness of the central peak). It also measures the amount of probability in the tails (the sharpness of the central peak) (Sapountzi, 2018).

Reference: Sapountzi, A. (2018). Descriptive Statistics/Tell me the Summary of What Happened.

contributed by Marigrace Walker