The mode in mathematics is the value that appears most frequently in a data set. In other words, it is the number or item that occurs the highest number of times among all observations. Some key points about the mode:
- It is one of the measures of central tendency, alongside mean and median.
- A data set can have one mode (unimodal), two modes (bimodal), multiple modes (multimodal), or no mode at all if no value repeats.
- To find the mode, you count how many times each value appears, and the value with the highest frequency is the mode.
- For grouped continuous data, there is a formula to estimate the mode using the frequencies of the modal class and its neighboring classes.
Example:
In the data set {1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5}, the mode is 4 because it appears
three times, more than any other value. A simple way to remember mode is "Mode
is Most" — the most frequently occurring value in the data.
