Kurtosis

Kurtosis is used to assess how heavy a distribution’s tails are and how prone it is to producing outliers. It matters not only for understanding the peak of the curve, but also for understanding extreme behavior. High kurtosis can signal that rare but large deviations occur more often than expected. This is especially valuable in risk modeling, anomaly analysis, and robust statistical methods. In many real-world problems, the most important behavior does not occur in the center, but in the tails.