Data Analysis

Mode is a measure of central tendency -- it's a number that can summarize a set of data or a group of numbers.

The mode of a set of numbers is the number that appears the most often.

Mode is the simplest measure of central tendency.  It's also the one that is most likely to be not very useful -- so know how to find it and what it means, but don't rely on it exclusively (always figure out the median and mean also if you're trying to learn something about a set of data).

How do you find a mode?

Whenever we have more than a few points of data, we need some ways to describe it. We can talk about the minimum (lowest number) or maximum (highest number) or range (distance between the minimum and maximum), but we usually want to find a way to describe the middle or the majority of the data. That's what measures of central tendency do: they use different methods to describe the middle of the data.