Transforming Skewed Data for Machine Learning

Skewed data is common in data science; skew is the degree of distortion from a normal distribution. For example, below is a plot of the house prices from Kaggle's House Price Competition that is right skewed, meaning there are a minority of very large values. Why do we care if the data is skewed? If the response variable is skewed like in Kaggle's House Prices Competition, the model…