Multiple choice

Which of these is a descriptor of the shape of a probability distribution?

  1. Standard deviation

  2. Median

  3. Coefficient of variation

  4. Kurtosis

  5. Index of dispersion
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D Correct answer
Explanation

Kurtosis 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.

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