Skip to content

Algorithms | latest | spectral-kurtosis

Spectral kurtosis

Spectral kurtosis is a measure of the "tailedness" or peakedness of the power spectrum around its mean, the spectral centroid fcentroid. It indicates how much of the spectrum's power is concentrated in the tails of the distribution compared to the center:

  • High kurtosis: Indicates a distribution with heavy tails and a sharp peak (leptokurtic). This suggests that the spectral energy is concentrated in a few frequencies with significant deviations from the mean.
  • Low kurtosis: Indicates a flatter distribution (platykurtic). This suggests that the spectral energy is more evenly spread across frequencies.
  • Normal kurtosis (value of 3): Indicates a normal distribution (mesokurtic).

It is computed from the power spectrum Xp=|X|2RM.

SpectralKurtosis=m4m24mx=m=0M1(f(m)fcentroid)xp(m)f(i)=ifs2(M1)p(i)=Xp[i]m=0M1Xp[m]

References

Code

INFO

The following snippet is written in a generic and unoptimized manner. The code aims to be comprehensible to programmers familiar with various programming languages and may not represent the most efficient or idiomatic Python practices. Please refer to implementations for optimized implementations in different programming languages.

py
import numpy as np


def _spectral_centroid(spectrum: np.ndarray, samplerate: float):
    ps = np.abs(spectrum) ** 2
    ps_sum = 0.0
    ps_sum_weighted = 0.0
    for i, magnitude in enumerate(ps):
        ps_sum += magnitude
        ps_sum_weighted += magnitude * i
    return 0.5 * samplerate / (len(ps) - 1) * (ps_sum_weighted / ps_sum)


def spectral_kurtosis(spectrum: np.ndarray, samplerate: float):
    f_centroid = _spectral_centroid(spectrum, samplerate)
    ps = np.abs(spectrum) ** 2
    ps_sum = 0.0
    ps_sum_weighted_2 = 0.0
    ps_sum_weighted_4 = 0.0
    for i, magnitude in enumerate(ps):
        f = 0.5 * samplerate / (len(ps) - 1) * i
        ps_sum += magnitude
        ps_sum_weighted_2 += magnitude * (f - f_centroid) ** 2
        ps_sum_weighted_4 += magnitude * (f - f_centroid) ** 4
    return (ps_sum_weighted_4 / ps_sum) / np.sqrt(ps_sum_weighted_2 / ps_sum) ** 4
Run in playground