Raw Moments: In mathematics, moment is, loosely speaking, a quantitative measure of the shape of a set of points. The "second moment", for example, is widely used and measures the "width" (in a particular sense) of a set of points in one dimension or in higher dimensions measures the shape of a cloud of points as it could be fit by an ellipsoid. Other moments describe other aspects of a distribution such as how the distribution is skewed from its mean, or peaked. The mathematical concept is closely related to the concept of moment in physics, although moment in physics is often represented somewhat differently. Any distribution can be characterized by a number of features (such as the mean, the variance, the skewness, etc.), and the moments of a function describe the nature of its distribution.
Central Moments: In probability theory and statistics, the kth moment about the mean (or kth central moment) of a real-valued random variable X is the quantity μk := E[(X − E[X])k], where E is the expectation operator. For a continuous univariate probability distribution with probability density function f(x) the moment about the mean μ is.
0 Comments