ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to properties of the distributions moment based properties, moment, cumulant, and probability generating functions and centile based properties. It concerns some general distributional properties, including measures of location, scale, skewness, and kurtosis. A scale parameter usually represents or is related to the ‘spread’ of the distribution. Occasionally it is the standard deviation or the coefficient of variation of the distribution. A distribution with a heavier tail to the right than the left usually has positive skewness, while one with a heavier tail to the left usually has negative skewness, and a symmetric distribution has zero skewness.
