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visualizing leptokurtic vs. platykurtic

July 14, 2014

I keep hearing kurtosis described graphically as the "thickness of
the tails", but I know I'm not alone in finding this unhelpful when
looking at histograms and trying to determine whether something is
lepto- or platykurtic - even with a Normal distribution drawn on top
for comparison.

I personally prefer Wikipedia's description which describes kurtosis
as the measure of "peakedness", rather than the "thickness" of the
"tails". When looking at a uniform or multimodal distribution, the
concept of tails isn't really useful for me. But I can see when a
distribution looks more or less peaked in the middle, or wider toward
the top. Try looking at the following graph with that in mind and see
what I mean:

image

Also this:

[]

Hope someone else finds that useful! If you have any tips of your own
please share.

Tags statistics, grad school, analytics, learning
- proportionally accurate donor pyramids -

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