How do you find the mode of a set of numbers? The good news is you don’t have to rearrange the whole set of numbers to find the range. You do however have to check each value to see which one occurs most often in a set. Remember, it is ok to have multiple modes, so if two or more numbers occur the same amount of times in a data set (more than all the others) they are both the modes.
How to Find the Mode
The mode is one of the easiest statistical values to find in a set of numbers. The only goal is to find the number (or numbers) that happen the most often in the group. You don’t have to remember how many times it shows up, just the number itself.
To find it, scan through the list and record duplicates. Once you’re finished, the number that occurs most is the mode. No calculations are needed, ever. This works on a small group of numbers or a large group. It doesn’t matter if they have decimals or anything else. Just find the one that happens the most.
Mode Example Problem
Let’s find the range of this set of data:
10, 16, 19, 21, 13, 16, 25, 29, 10, 12, 18, 16, 20, 27, 11, 15
When you look through this set of numbers, you see there are more than one 10 and more than one 16. We compare the two and see that 16 is the only number that occurs 3 separate times. 16 is the mode.
Another Mode Example Problem
Let’s find the range of the following set:
57, 43, 65, 55, 39, 50, 65, 64, 52, 61, 49
We see that 65 is only number that is repeated, so it is the mode. Even if it only happens twice, it still happens more than any other number, which is all you need. Although it didn’t happen in the above example, if we had two different numbers that happened twice, they would BOTH be the mode.
To learn how to find other values of a set of numbers, check out the other articles in this series: