Mode, a term commonly used in mathematics and specifically in statistics, is the value in a data set which occurs most frequently. Mode is a measure of central tendency which is often grouped in with mean and median but generally has a significantly different value.

Of all of the various measures of central tendency and averages, calculating mode is generally one of the easier calculations to make. For example, let’s pretend we are analyzing a data set containing information about your local high school football team. The data set contains your team’s total score for each of their past 8 games and contains the following: [3,7,14,14,17,21,28,42].

To calculate the mode of this data set, you simply find the most frequently repeated value. In this case, the mode is 14. Notice that 14 is repeated twice and is the only reoccurring number in this set of data.

In some cases, a data set can have multiple modes. If your sample data contains two modes, the data set is called bimodal. If your sample data contains more than two modes, the data set is called multimodal. If every value in your data set occurs the same number of times then no mode exists.

An example of a multimodal data set would be the following: [7,7,14,21,21,24,42,42]. Notice that the numbers 7, 21, and 42 are all repeated twice in the sample data. Since there is no unique value which occurs more than twice in the data, 7, 21, and 42 are all modes of this data sample and the sample is considered to be multimodal.

To use our mode calculator, simply enter your data set with all values separated by commas and no spaces. For example: 9,2,5,4,6. This mode calculator supports data samples with multiple modes.