Thursday, November 7, 2013

lit: Skewness and kurtosis in BTFR

McGaugh 2012:
A persistent problem with interpreting astronomical data is whether Gaussian statistics actually apply. One reason for this is that systematic errors often dominate random ones. We can check whether this might be an issue here by examining higher order statistics like the skew (lopsidedness) and kurtosis (pointiness) of the distribution in the deviations perpendicular to the BTFR. If the data are well behaved (i.e., distributed normally), the skew and kurtosis should be small.

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