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The Daily Insight

What is an example of a left skewed distribution?

Author

Isabella Ramos

Updated on February 25, 2026

A distribution is called skewed left if, as in the histogram above, the left tail (smaller values) is much longer than the right tail (larger values). An example of a real life variable that has a skewed left distribution is age of death from natural causes (heart disease, cancer, etc.).

What does a skewness of 1 mean?

As a general rule of thumb: If skewness is less than -1 or greater than 1, the distribution is highly skewed. If skewness is between -1 and -0.5 or between 0.5 and 1, the distribution is moderately skewed. If skewness is between -0.5 and 0.5, the distribution is approximately symmetric.

Are house prices skewed left or right?

The distribution of house prices is skewed to the right because most houses cost a modest amount but a few cost a very large amount.

What do you need to calculate first before calculating skewness?

For calculating skewness, you first need to calculate each observation’s deviation from the mean (the difference between each value and arithmetic average of all values). The deviation from the mean for ith observation equals:

What does skewness mean in statistics?

In probability theory and statistics, skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable about its mean.

What does the coefficient of skewness tell you?

The coefficient of skewness measures the skewness of a distribution . It is based on the notion of the moment of the distribution. This coefficient is one of the measures of skewness.

What do we mean by skewness?

Skewness measures the deviation of a random variable’s given distribution from the normal distribution,which is symmetrical on both sides.

  • A given distribution can be either be skewed to the left or the right.
  • Investors take note of skewness while assessing investments’ return distribution since extreme data points are also considered.