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The mode is a descriptive statistic that reflects the most often occurring element of a set of data and is used as a summary measure. For example, the mode is 3 in the set of numbers 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 10 since it appears twice while all the other numbers appear only once. A set of integers can be bimodal or multimodal, which means it has two or more modes. For example, the set 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 10 has modes 3 and 10. (confirmed by our mode calculator).
The mode is the most common number in a set, and it is one of the three most commonly used statistics, alongside the arithmetic mean and median. Outliers and extreme values have the least impact on the mode of the three.
Follow these three steps to determine the mode of a collection of numbers:
Is it possible to have multiple modes?
When there are two or more equal counts, a complication occurs, and there can be two or more modes. Bimodal refers to a set with two modes, while multimodal refers to a set with more than two modes. Here’s an example of a bimodal number distribution:
This example set of numbers contains the following numbers (sorted): 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7.
For non-numerical (e.g. categorical) data such as names or family names, occupations, automobile types, and so on, mode calculation makes sense. The mode of the set of votes is at the heart of most voting systems throughout the world – counting who received the most votes, determining whose name appears most frequently in the set of votes cast, and so on.
An example of probability theory in action: if you know a set’s mode is “5” and you have to guess what the value of a randomly picked element from the set will be, the mode is your best bet. You can simply compute the arithmetic mode for even big datasets using an online calculator.
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