How to Find the Mode or Modal Value
The mode is simply the number which appears most often.
To find the
mode, or modal value, first put the numbers
in order.
Look at these numbers:
3, 7, 5, 13, 20, 23, 39, 23, 40, 23, 14, 12, 56, 23, 29
In order these numbers are: 3, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 20, 23, 23, 23, 23, 29, 39, 40, 56
This makes it easy to see which numbers appear the most.
In this case the mode is 23.
Another Example: {19, 8, 29, 35, 19, 28, 15}
Arrange them in order: {8, 15, 19, 19, 28, 29, 35}
19 appears twice, all the rest appear only once, so 19 is the mode.
More Than One Mode
You can have more than one mode.
Example: {1, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 9} has modes at 3 and 6
Having two modes is called "bimodal".
Having more than two modes is called "multimodal".
When all values appear the same number of times the idea of a mode is not useful. But you could group them to see if one group has more than the others.
Example: {4, 7, 11, 16, 20, 22, 25, 26, 33}
Each value occurs once, so let us try to group them.
In groups of 10, the "20s" appear most often, so we could choose 25 as the mode.
You could use different groupings and get a different answer!
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