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Statistics vocabulary · Descriptive Statistics

Mode

Meaning in statistics, with examples

/moʊd/nounCore term

In statistics, mode means: The value that appears most often in a data set. A distribution can have one mode, two (bimodal) or several.

In Turkish: mod, tepe değer

How it is used

Most useful for categorical data, where a mean is meaningless: the most common answer, brand or blood type. Also used to describe the shape of a distribution: unimodal, bimodal, multimodal.

Example sentences

  1. The mode for shoe size in our sample was 42.

  2. The histogram shows two modes, which suggests two different groups of customers.

Common collocations

  • find the mode
  • bimodal distribution
  • modal category
  • modal value
  • meanThe sum of all the values divided by the number of values; the usual 'average' that describes the centre of a set of numbers.
  • medianThe middle value when the data are put in order from smallest to largest; with an even number of values, it is the mean of the two middle ones.
  • frequencyThe number of times a value or category occurs in a data set; a relative frequency gives the same information as a proportion or percentage.
  • distributionThe pattern showing which values a variable takes and how often each one occurs, often pictured as a histogram or a curve.

More terms: Descriptive Statistics

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