Mode (statistics)

Article summary

In statistics, the mode is the value that appears most often in a set of data values. If is a discrete random variable, the mode is the value at which the probability mass function takes its maximum value, i.e., . In other words, it is the value that is most likely to be sampled. Like the statistical mean and median, the mode is a summary statistic about the central tendency of a random variable or a population. The numerical value of the mode is the same as that of the mean and median in a normal distribution, but it may be very different in highly skewed distributions. The mode is not necessarily unique in a given discrete distribution since the probability mass function may take the same maximum value at several points , , etc. The most extreme case occurs in uniform distributions, where all values occur equally frequently. A mode of a continuous probability distribution is often considered to be any value at which its probability density function has a locally maximum value. When the probability density function of a continuous distribution has multiple local maxima it is common to refer to all of the local maxima as modes of the distribution, so any peak is a mode. Such a continuous distribution is called multimodal (as opposed to unimodal). In symmetric unimodal distributions, such as the normal distribution, the mean (if defined), median and mode all coincide.…

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