While skewness and kurtosis are used mostly as descriptive terms (such as “That distribution is negatively skewed”), there are mathematical indicators of how skewed or kurtotic a distribution is. For example, skewness is computed by subtracting the value of the median from the mean. If the mean of a distribution is 100 and the median is 95, the skewness value is 100 − 95 = 5, a positive number, and the distribution is positively skewed. If the mean of a distribution is 85 and the median is 90, the skewness value is 85 − 90 = −5, and the distribution is negatively skewed. There’s an even more
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