Mode

To find the mode, look for the value that occurs more frequently than any other. In the values 3, 5, 5, 7 and 10, the mode is 5, because it appears twice and every other value appears once.

A data set can have one mode, more than one mode or no mode at all if every value appears the same number of times. A set with two modes is called bimodal.

The mode is the only common average that can be used for categories rather than numbers. For example, a shoe shop might find that size 39 is the mode of its sales, telling it which size to stock most of. A bank might find that the most common reason customers contact it is to check a balance.

In finance, the mode is less commonly used than the mean and median for numerical data, because it may not represent the centre of the data well and can change a lot with small changes in the data. It is most useful for understanding the most typical or popular outcome, such as the most frequent transaction amount or the most common loan size.