AI engineering glossary · Feature engineering data prep
What is kurtosis?
Kurtosis: A measure of how heavy the tails of a distribution are compared with a normal distribution. High kurtosis means extreme values occur more often than a bell curve would predict. It helps judge whether outliers are a systematic feature of the data.
Kurtosis: an example
Daily stock returns typically have high kurtosis: rare big crashes or jumps occur more often than a normal distribution suggests.
Related terms
More Feature engineering data prep terms
- Label encoding
- Lag feature
- Last observation carried forward
- Leave-one-out encoding
- Lemmatization
- Listwise deletion
- Log transform
- Mahalanobis distance
Where you learn it
Kurtosis is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.