[R] about comparison of KURTOSIS in package: moments and fBasics

Baize, Harold HBaize at buttecounty.net
Mon Dec 5 17:32:09 CET 2005




Thanks to Spencer Graves for providing links to explain
the various types of kurtosis reported by R packages. 

Spencer Graves>>(http://mathworld.wolfram.com/k-Statistic.html).

Spencer also said:

SG>>	  However, these are little used, as the estimates are known to be so 
SG>> highly variable.  It is generally preferred to transform to normality or 
SG>> to use some other distribution and then use maximum likelihood.

This advice is good if your interest is comparing models, but what 
if variation in kurtosis itself is your interest? I am wondering if 
someone could provide some direction for answering questions about 
differences between samples in kurtosis. There are tests of 
significance for means and variance. How would one test hypotheses 
of difference in kurtosis between samples? 

Thanks in advance. 

Harold Baize
Youth Services Evaluator
Butte County Department of Behavioral Health




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