Understanding Skewness and Kurtosis: A Friendly Guide for Data Enthusiasts

If you've ever looked at a histogram and thought, "Hmm... this looks weirdly stretched or tilted," you're not alone. What you're noticing might be skewness or kurtosis — two important concepts in statistics that describe the shape of a distribution.

📈 What is Skewness?

Skewness tells us about the asymmetry of a distribution.

positive skewed:

Tail stretches more on the right. Mean > Median.

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negatively skewed:

Tail stretches more on the left. Mean < Median.

Zero skewness:

Perfectly symmetrical (like a normal distribution).

💡 Example in Python:

python
import scipy.stats as stats
import numpy as np

data = np.random.exponential(scale=2, size=1000)
print("Skewness:", stats.skew(data))