Cartoon showing the concept of moment-based summary statistics for light-curve analysis. The bottom panel shows an example light curve. The orange and blue annotation indicates the flux differences for two given time lags, τ₁ and τ₂. The top panel shows the histogram of flux differences for every time lag, τ_i. Each histogram has its respective statistical moments: mean (μ₁), variance (μ₂), and skewness (μ₃). At the upper right, variance and skewness are plotted as functions of time lag.