Mode | Statistics

The mode is a measure of the central value, the most common value in a data set. The mode is the value that occurs most frequently among all the observations.

The mode is particularly useful when we have to calculate the central value in a data set that consists of nominal data or ordinal data. The mode can be calculated for all data levels, nominal data, ordinal data, interval data and ratio data. The mode is unaffected by extreme values and can be obtained in frequency distributions with open classes.

In many data sets, it may be that no value occurs the most times or that there are three values that occur the most times. The mode of the following data set is 9, which occurs 2 times.

2 3 6 9 9 14 18