How do we check if a variable follows the normal distribution? | datascienceinfo

How do we check if a variable follows the normal distribution?

Plot a histogram out of the sampled data. If you can fit the bell-shaped "normal" curve to the histogram, then the hypothesis that the underlying random variable follows the normal distribution can not be rejected.

Check Skewness and Kurtosis of the sampled data. Skewness = 0 and kurtosis = 3 are typical for a normal distribution, so the farther away they are from these values, the more non-normal the distribution.

Use Kolmogorov-Smirnov or/and Shapiro-Wilk tests for normality. They take into account both Skewness and Kurtosis simultaneously.

Check for Quantile-Quantile plot. It is a scatterplot created by plotting two sets of quantiles against one another. Normal Q-Q plot place the data points in a roughly straight line