Terminology
Most of the Stats department is currently moving from the leafy park-like north end of campus back to the glass and concrete Tower of Science. While we’re in transit, here’s a bogus poll on statistical terminology.
Distributions can be classified as to whether they produce more outliers or fewer outliers than a normal distribution. The terms are “platykurtic” (same Greek root as platypus, meaning “flat”) and “leptokurtic” (Greek root meaning “thin”)
Update: answer, and potentially discussion, in the comments
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
With skewness, the problems are much more obvious. A skewed distribution has a bulge on one side and a long tail on the other, and I can’t remember whether ‘left-skewed’ means the bulge is on the left, or the long tail. So I stick with positively and negatively skewed.
For kurtosis, I thought I knew which term was which. It just made sense that `platykurtic’ was the one with outliers. Unfortunately, whoever came up with the names thought differently.
12 years ago