Mode
Topic: Economic Data: Census, NSS, Surveys and Statistical Tools · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 4 "Presentation of Data"; Class 11, Ch 5 "Measures of Central Tendency"; Class 11, Ch 8 "Use of Statistical Tools"
Meaning
The mode is the value that occurs most often in a data set. It shows where the items are most concentrated. It is the only average that works for qualitative data, which are attributes such as brand, colour or size category. A data set may have one mode, two modes (bimodal), many modes (multimodal), or no mode at all. For grouped data, the mode lies in the modal class and is found by formula. It can also be found graphically from a histogram.
Example
A shoe shop cares most about the shoe size in greatest demand, and that size is the mode. The series 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4 has no mode, because every value occurs equally often.
Don't confuse with
- Median: the median is the middle value in order, read from the ogives. The mode is the most frequent value, read from a histogram.
Related concepts
- Measures of central tendency
- Arithmetic mean
- Weighted arithmetic mean
- Median
- Quartiles
- Decile
- Percentiles
- Bimodal and multimodal distribution
- Modal class
- Relative position of mean, median and mode