On the Meaning and Use of Kurtosis

For symmetric unimodal distributions, positive kurtosis indicates heavy tails and peakedness relative to the normal distribution, whereas negative kurtosis indicates light tails and flatness. Many textbooks, however, describe or illustrate kurtosis incompletely or incorrectly. In this article, kurtosis is illustrated with well-known distributions, and aspects of its interpretation and misinterpretation are discussed. The role of kurtosis in testing univariate and multivariate normality; as a measure of departures from normality; in issues of robustness, outliers, and bimodality; in generalized tests and estimators, as well as limitations of and alternatives to the kurtosis measure [32, are discussed.