Kurtosis

In probability theory and statistics, kurtosis (from the Greek word κυρτός, kyrtos or kurtos, meaning bulging) is any measure of the "peakedness" of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable. In a similar way to the concept of skewness, kurtosis is a descriptor of the shape of a probability distribution and, just as for skewness, there are different ways of quantifying it for a theoretical distribution and corresponding ways of estimating it from a sample from a population. There are various interpretations of kurtosis, and of how particular measures should be interpreted; these are primarily peakedness (width of peak), tail weight, and lack of shoulders (distribution primarily peak and tails, not in between).