Mode

The mode is the easiest central tendency to calculate because it is the data value that appears most often in a set. The number of times that a data value appears is called its frequency. Look at the following data set.

The number that appears the most number of times is the number 4. Four appears three different times. If more than one number appear at the same highest frequency, then the data set has more than one mode.

Frequency Tables

One easy way to determine the mode is to create a frequency table. To do this, you make a table with two columns. In the first column, you put a list of all the unique numbers in the data set. In the second column, you put the number of times the corresponding number appears. The frequency table for the data set given above is shown below.