Modaaliarvo

Modaaliarvo, often translated as modal value or mode, is a statistical term representing the value that appears most frequently in a data set. It is one of the measures of central tendency, alongside the mean and median. Unlike the mean, which is sensitive to extreme values, and the median, which is the middle value in an ordered set, the mode is determined solely by the frequency of observations.

A data set can have one mode (unimodal), two modes (bimodal), or more than two modes (multimodal). If all values in a data set occur with the same frequency, then there is no mode, or sometimes all values are considered modes, depending on the convention. The mode is particularly useful for categorical data, where the mean and median might not be applicable. For example, in a survey of favorite colors, the modal color would be the one chosen most often. In numerical data, the mode can be identified by tallying the occurrences of each distinct value.