long-tail distribution

Terms from Statistics for HCI: Making Sense of Quantitative Data

A distribution where there are very high (or very low) values but they occur with very low frequency. Examples include income distributions (small numbers of very rich individuals) and numbers of contacts in social network data (a small number of people with very large numbers of 'friends'). A specific example is a power-law distribution, which is often used as a model of network data.

Defined on page 46

Used on page 46

Also known as long tail