Mode (statistics)

The mode of a set of data values is the value that appears most often. If X is a discrete random variable, the mode is the value x (i.e, X = x) at which the probability mass function takes its maximum value. In other words, it is the value that is most likely to be sampled. The mode of a set of data values is the value that appears most often. If X is a discrete random variable, the mode is the value x (i.e, X = x) at which the probability mass function takes its maximum value. In other words, it is the value that is most likely to be sampled. Like the statistical mean and median, the mode is a way of expressing, in a (usually) single number, important information about 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, and it may be very different in highly skewed distributions. The mode is not necessarily unique to a given discrete distribution, since the probability mass function may take the same maximum value at several points x1, x2, etc. The most extreme case occurs in uniform distributions, where all values occur equally frequently. 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. Such a continuous distribution is called multimodal (as opposed to unimodal). A mode of a continuous probability distribution is often considered to be any value x at which its probability density function has a locally maximum value, so any peak is a mode. In symmetric unimodal distributions, such as the normal distribution, the mean (if defined), median and mode all coincide. For samples, if it is known that they are drawn from a symmetric unimodal distribution, the sample mean can be used as an estimate of the population mode. The mode of a sample is the element that occurs most often in the collection. For example, the mode of the sample is 6. Given the list of data the mode is not unique – the dataset may be said to be bimodal, while a set with more than two modes may be described as multimodal. For a sample from a continuous distribution, such as , the concept is unusable in its raw form, since no two values will be exactly the same, so each value will occur precisely once. In order to estimate the mode of the underlying distribution, the usual practice is to discretize the data by assigning frequency values to intervals of equal distance, as for making a histogram, effectively replacing the values by the midpoints of theintervals they are assigned to. The mode is then the value where the histogram reaches its peak. For small or middle-sized samples the outcome of this procedure is sensitive to the choice of interval width if chosen too narrow or too wide; typically one should have a sizable fraction of the data concentrated in a relatively small number of intervals (5 to 10), while the fraction of the data falling outside these intervals is also sizable. An alternate approach is kernel density estimation, which essentially blurs point samples to produce a continuous estimate of the probability density function which can provide an estimate of the mode. The following MATLAB (or Octave) code example computes the mode of a sample: