Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Mode

Mode is the value in a dataset that appears the most frequently.

For example:

In the following the sample, the mode is 5

1
1
2
5
6
2
9
5
7
5
2
5
9
5

Count the number of times 5 appears. It appears the most, so it is the mode.

Some datasets have more than one mode.

If there is a single mode, the term 'unimodal' is used. The example above is unimodal. There are five 5's. Had there also been five 2's, than the example is no longer unimodal. Then, both five and two would be called modes.

The mean, median, and mode are all measures of central tendency. The skew can be determined by comparing these three measures.