Kurtosis Examples Kurtosis Formulas Kurtosis or Excess Kurtosis ? Kurtosis Calculation Example Platykurtic, Mesokurtic and Leptokurtic In statistics, kurtosis refers to the “peakedness” of the distribution for a quantitative variable. What's meant by “peakedness” is best understood from the example histograms shown below. Kurtosis Examples Test 4 is almost perfectly normally distributed. Its excess kurtosis is therefore close to 0. The distribution for test 3 is somewhat “ flatter ... Skewness and kurtosis are statistical measures that describe the shape of a data distribution. While skewness indicates the asymmetry of the distribution, kurtosis measures the heaviness of its tails compared to a normal distribution. Kurtosis refers to the degree of presence of outliers (extreme values) in the distribution. Kurtosis is a statistical measure, whether the data is heavy-tailed or light-tailed in a normal distribution. Skewness measures the asymmetry of a data distribution around its mean, whereas Kurtosis measures the " tailedness" or the sharpness of the peak of a data distribution .