Example of a long tail distribution
A long-tailed distribution is a type of heavy-tailed distribution that has a tail (or tails) that drop off gradually and asymptotically.
3 practical examples include the power law, the Pareto principle (more commonly known as the 80–20 rule), and product sales (i.e. best selling products vs others).
It’s important to be mindful of long-tailed distributions in classification and regression problems because the least frequently occurring values make up the majority of the population. This can ultimately change the way that you deal with outliers, and it also conflicts with some machine learning techniques with the assumption that the data is normally distributed.
