Long tail

Common card · No. 249247

In statistics and business, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having many occurrences far from the "head" or central part of the distribution. The distribution could involve popularities, random numbers of occurrences of events with various probabilities, etc. The term is often used loosely, with an imprecise definition, but precise definitions are possible. In statistics, the term long-tailed distribution has a narrow technical meaning, and is a subtype of heavy-tailed distribution. Intuitively, a distribution is (right) long-tailed if, for any fixed amount, when a quantity exceeds a high level, it almost certainly exceeds it by at least that amount: large quantities are probably even larger. Note that there is no sense of the "long tail" of a distribution, but only the property of a distribution being long-tailed. In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity...

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