I was doing some review and was wondering which way outliers are found using the standard deviation rule. Some methods say any value 2 SD above or below the mean is an outlier while other methods say 3 SD above or below the mean.
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Some outliers are clearly impossible. You mention 48 kg for baby weight. This is clearly an error. That's not a statistical issue, it's a substantive one. There are no 48 kg human babies. Any statistical method will identify such a point.
Personally, rather than rely on any test (even appropriate ones, as recommended by @Michael) I would graph the data. Showing that a certain data value (or values) are unlikely under some hypothesized distribution does not mean the value is wrong and therefore values shouldn't be automatically deleted just because they are extreme.
In addition, the rule you propose (2 SD from the mean) is an old one that was used in the days before computers made things easy. If N is 100,000, then you certainly expect quite a few values more than 2 SD from the mean, even if there is a perfect normal distribution.
But what if the distribution is wrong? Suppose, in the population, the variable in question is not normally distributed but has heavier tails than that?
Yes. It is a bad way to "detect" oultiers. For normally distributed data, such a method would call 5% of the perfectly good (yet slightly extreme) observations "outliers". Also when you have a sample of size n and you look for extremely high or low observations to call them outliers, you are really looking at the extreme order statistics. The maximum and minimum of a normally distributed sample is not normally distributed. So the test should be based on the distribution of the extremes. That is what Grubbs' test and Dixon's ratio test do as I have mention several times before. Even when you use an appropriate test for outliers an observation should not be rejected just because it is unusually extreme. You should investigate why the extreme observation occurred first.