To illustrate this relationship, let's consider the following categories of distribution shapes.
- A symmetric bell-shaped distribution has one mound, and the left side of the distribution roughly mirrors the right side.
- A right-skewed distribution has a “tail” to the right hand side of the distribution. In other words, most values are relatively small, but a few values are very large.
- Conversely, a left-skewed distribution mostly contains relatively large values, but also a few very small values.
- A bimodal distribution contains two peaks, or modes. A bimodal distribution can be symmetric or asymmetric.
Note that there are more than these four types of distributions, which can be explored in the interactive portion of this activity.