The Jarque-Bera test is named after Carlos Jarque and Anil K. Bera. It measures whether a set of data points is normally distributed or not. The formula for the Jarque-Bera test is as follows:
In this formula, n is the number of data points, S is the sample skewness, and K is the sample kurtosis. For an explanation of skewness and kurtosis, see the previous Analyzing kurtosis recipe in this chapter. The Jarque-Bera test is an important test in statistics because many statistical methods rely on having a normal distribution. Thus, if your data is not normally distributed, the application of certain statistical methods would be invalid.
This recipe demonstrates how to utilize the Jarque-Bera test on a set of data.
