About the Measures of Skewness and Kurtosis

Abstract

Summary:

This article sets forth a comparative analysis of five coefficients measuring the degree of skewness in empirical statistic distributions. The coefficients are calculated for the distributions of live-births as per the age of the mother. The data are in total for Bulgaria, respectively for all children born, for first and second child during the period from 1961 to 2008. A discussion is presented as regards the cognitive meaning and reasons for variation in their values. The link between skewness and kurtosis is being examined and the necessity of their joint use is being justified given, the existence of empirical distributions that are not subject to the law of Laplace – Gauss. Unlike the predominant practice to place the focus of attention mostly on kurtosis in symmetrical distributions, the opposite task is set here – to analyze the existence of skewness given a different degree of kurtosis.