Heavy-tailed distribution

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In probability theory, heavy-tailed distributions are probability distributions whose tails are not exponentially bounded: that is, they have heavier tails than the exponential distribution. Roughly speaking, "heavy-tailed" means the distribution decreases more slowly than an exponential distribution, so extreme values are more likely. In many applications it is the right tail of the distribution that is of interest, but a distribution may have a heavy left tail, or both tails may be heavy. There are three important subclasses of heavy-tailed distributions: the fat-tailed distributions, the long-tailed distributions, and the subexponential distributions. In practice, all commonly used heavy-tailed distributions belong to the subexponential class, introduced by Jozef Teugels. There is still some discrepancy over the use of the term heavy-tailed. There are two other definitions in use. Some authors use the term to refer to those distributions which do not have all their power moments...

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