KURTOSIS- Peakedness or tailedness??
In most of the introductory courses in statistics, we get acquainted to the various descriptive measures used in order to summarize the different features of a given data set. Our emphasis lies primarily on the computation of these descriptive measures using a set of mathematical formulas. We do not give much thought to it's interpretation. In some cases, it might happen that the measures are misinterpreted or are not completely understood. Kurtosis is one such instance! Kurtosis is one of the most useful measures of a distribution, but it is one of the most commonly misinterpreted measures as well. Many textbooks interpret kurtosis as the degree of peakedness or flatness of a theoretical probability distribution or the histogram obtained on the basis of a number of sample observations.We recently came across one such instance of misinterpretation of kurtosis while solving exercises from the celebrated book on statistical Inference by George Casella and ...