Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Having a heavy tail: used specifically in the phrase heavy-tailed duck, the ruddy duck, Erismatura rubida.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective statistics Having a heavy tail; leptokurtic.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • It is much harder to explain how a heavy-tailed distribution would naturally arise.

    Non-normal Distributions, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • Then again you can do much worse than just using normal assumptions (maybe autochecking a few heavy-tailed/one-sided/clever alternatives using some information criterion against overfitting) and churning on that. 95% of the result in 5% of the effort …

    NeuroBayes: Sometimes sans Neuro « Imaginary Potential 2008

  • You need to watch it if there are outliers from non-Gaussian heavy-tailed distributions, and a favourite topic of yours, I believe heavily autocorrelated errors like stationary ARMA processes.

    Mannomatic Smoothing and Pinned End-points « Climate Audit 2007

  • She was not surprised to see the last was a big green heavy-tailed person, though her heart said O Trohdwyr -- and for an instant tears stung and blurred.

    A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows Anderson, Poul, 1926- 1974

  • Any infringement of these rules must have been at the proper peril of the contumacious infringer; and as it is more than probable some of the brooms carried double, there was a very decent chance of the intruder's discovering himself across one of the heavy-tailed and strong-backed breed, taking a trip to some distant bourne, from whence that compulsory aerial traveller would doubtless never have returned.

    Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, November 20, 1841 Various

  • The vegetation was luxuriant beyond description; and it was ludicrous to see the heavy-tailed kangaroos leaping and floundering about in the long grass when they had quitted their beaten pathways and were suddenly disturbed by our approach.

    Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, Volume 1 George Grey 1855

  • The statistical distributions characterizing the fluctuations in these networks are generally "heavy-tailed", meaning that their standard deviations are extremely large - there are no "typical" values for many of the quantities of interest.

    physicsworld.com: all content 2010

  • His current research focuses on insurance mathematics, such as heavy-tailed distributions, life contingencies, multivariate distributions, empirical

    Business Wire Travel News 2010

  • A Levy walk is characterized by infinite run length variance, involving a heavy-tailed distribution, often following power law distribution with 1

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Peter J. M. Van Haastert et al. 2009

  • Our findings may also provide insight into the origins of heavy-tailed distributions in other complex systems.

    Original Signal - Transmitting Digg 2008

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