More on Moments

• A clever way to minimize round-off error when computing the variance is to use the corrected two-pass algorithm. First compute <x>, then do:

  • The second sum would be zero if <x> were exact, but otherwise it does a good job of correcting RE in Var.

• Higher moments, like skewness (3rd moment) and kurtosis (4th moment) are also sometimes used.

Notes: