How do you determine which number is the mode in a number set if there are several numbers with the same number of numbers?

Answer 1

The mode average of a set of data is the data item or items that occur the most often.

As more than one item in the dataset can occur with the same frequency, there can be more than one mode average - all of the items in the set with that frequency are the mode average. However, if every item in the dataset occurs with the same frequency, then there is no mode average.

Examples:

In {2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8} the mode is 4.

In {2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7} the mode is both 4 and 5.

In {2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6} the mode is 3, 4 and 5.

In {3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6} there is no mode as all the items occur with the same frequency (of 2).

The mode average is difference from the other two averages (mean and media) in that the dataset does not have to contain numbers. For example, a survey of drinks may have a dataset which contains {Tea, Coffee, Chocolate, Lemonade}; each drink will have a frequency depending upon how many of the people surveyed chose it, and from this the favourite (preferred) drink of those surveyed can be found as the drink which occurs the most often (in the responses) - this drink would be the mode of the dataset, eg it could be Coffee.