How to calculate skewness & kurtosis ?

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Mr LE
Mr LE on 1 Feb 2015
Commented: SUBHASMITA DASH on 31 May 2022
Hi,
I would like to calculate the third and fourth moment with returns data (matrix 1x132)
Do you know the function that can I use for that?
Thanks!

Answers (2)

Star Strider
Star Strider on 1 Feb 2015
Edited: Star Strider on 1 Feb 2015
If you have the Statistics Toolbox, you can calculate the skewness and kurtosis directly with their respective functions.
If you don’t have the Toolbox, it would be relatively easy to code those functions:
skewns = @(x) (sum((x-mean(x)).^3)./length(x)) ./ (var(x,1).^1.5);
kurtss = @(x) (sum((x-mean(x)).^4)./length(x)) ./ (var(x,1).^2);
These work for numeric vectors.
P.S. — Are your data double arrays or cells? If cells, you’ll likely have to use cellfun or cell2mat to work with any of these functions.
  2 Comments
Nidhi Singh
Nidhi Singh on 11 Feb 2022
@(x) showing me function handle .. But didn't show any values
Star Strider
Star Strider on 11 Feb 2022
Perhaps evaluating the functions with an argument vector would work?
skewns = @(x) (sum((x-mean(x)).^3)./length(x)) ./ (var(x,1).^1.5);
kurtss = @(x) (sum((x-mean(x)).^4)./length(x)) ./ (var(x,1).^2);
x = randn(1, 5000);
sk = skewns(x)
sk = 0.0412
kt = kurtss(x)
kt = 3.0302
.

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Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 1 Feb 2015
I have code where I do it from the histogram. You could easily adapt it to handle data not from a histogram. See the function at the bottom of the attached file. Let me know if you can't figure it out.

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