Illustration of heavy tails with the standardised Student-t distribution

The (standardised) Student-t distribution has heavier tails than the normal distribution. Fewer degrees of freedom (d.f.) correspond to heavier tails. The normal distribution is the limiting case as the number of d.f. goes to infinity.

For a \(t\)-distribution with \(\nu\) d.f., only moments of order \(k<\nu\) exist.

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