The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computing system program products for incrementally calculating kurtosis for Big Data or streamed data in real time by incrementally calculating one or more components of kurtosis. Embodiments of the invention include incrementally calculating one or more components of a kurtosis for a modified computation subset based on the one or more components of the kurtosis calculated for a pre-modified computation subset and then calculating the kurtosis based on the incrementally calculated components. Incrementally calculating kurtosis avoids visiting all data elements in the modified computation subset and performing redundant computations thereby increasing calculation efficiency, saving computing resources and reducing computing system's power consumption.