Fundamentals of Statistics contains material of various lectures and courses of H. Lohninger on statistics, data analysis and chemometrics......click here for more.


Home Univariate Data Measures of Location Mode
See also: median, mean 

Mode of a Distribution

The mode is the value which is most frequent in the data set. The mode is only of interest for large data sets, since the mode may be meaningless for a small sample.

The relative position of the mode, the median, and the mean provides an indication of the skewness of a distribution. Click on the figure above to see an example of differently skewed distributions.

The calculation of the mode D of classed data with equal bin widths (as in histograms) can be done according to the following equation:

with
xuklower border of the bin containing the greatest number of objects
bbin width
fkfrequency of the k-th class
fk-1, fk+1frequencies of the neighboring bins

Last Update: 2009-Mär-29