[Python-ideas] Pre-PEP 2nd draft: adding a statistics module to Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On 09/08/13 21:27, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
> On 9 August 2013 07:43, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

>> Or possibly both. Skew and kurtosis are especially egregious examples of
>> mathematicians being inconsistent in their terminology, notation and
>> definitions, but as far as I have been able to determine, there are three
>> common formulae for the third moment about the mean skewness:
>
> Perhaps they just shouldn't be included then. Does anyone here
> *really* have an application for computing skewness/kurtosis (don't
> just imagine one)?

Skewness and kurtois are useful when you need to know a data set's skewness and kurtosis :-)

I understand that kurtosis is especially used in economics. The main use for skew is, I believe, checking whether data is sufficiently close to normal that tests which assume normality will be valid. But I'm not an expert on these.

Do not fear, I am not proposing that they be included in the statistics module.



-- 
Steven