Mode
Topic: Geographical Data: Sources, Compilation and Processing · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 2 "Data Processing"; Class 12, Ch 4 "Spatial Information Technology"
Meaning
The mode is the value that occurs most often in a data set. A series may have one mode (unimodal), two (bimodal), three (trimodal), many (multimodal) or none at all. On a graph, the mode always sits at the hump, or peak, of the distribution. Unlike the mean and the median, it also works for data that come only in categories, such as crop names.
Example
If most farmers in a Punjab village grow wheat in the rabi season, wheat is the mode of the village's crop data. No mean or median can be worked out for crop names.
Don't confuse with
- Median: the middle value of an ordered series, not the most frequent one. The two match only in a symmetrical distribution.