Looking for real-world examples of usefulness of "mode" in statistical analysis

[Todd's keyboard]

Anyone have any good examples of why and when people would like to know the mode?

thanks, Todd's keyboard

[Buzz]

you clearly need to go hang out at the engineering department of your local college or university... :-)

[cbelt3]

It's mostly useful for determining clustering or 'hits'. For example, a retailer may want to know the mode of sizes purchased of clothing by store to help them set stocking levels. Store A has a mode of "Small", and Store B has a mode of "XXL".

Of course Store A is next to the global HQ of Anorexics R Us, and Store B is surrounded by doughnut shops.

[Article Accelerator]

Wikipedia has some good examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)

[davester]

A mode is useful for finding how often particular event happened. For a simplistic example, you might care how often people bought 1 cent, 5 cent, 10 cent, 25 cent, or 50 cent objects at a store so you knew what kind of objects to stock the most often. Only the mode would be useful. I almost never use the mode.

[Winston]

My favorite statistics example is how poorly average (mean) can depict things. Say you've got 10 kids who take a test. Nine of them score a 90, and one scores an 80. Nine of the kids out of ten scored above average!

People seem to always assume that distributions are bell-shaped, when often they are not.


- Winston

[Markintosh]

My math problem of the week for 7th graders includes that concept. The candy factory would use the mode to ensure that the most frequent number of candies in a bag is 50. In this particular problem, the average bag has 48 candies when counted via bulk weight. Random samples taken from the line all have 50 candies. So the mode is likely 50, while the mean is 48.

The appropriate conclusion may be that one of 25 filling machines is broken. So a few bags are getting out with far fewer than 50 candies.

[Winston]

That sounds like a great problem, and a great example of how the distribution matters. My 7th grade son is doing a statistics unit right now. He's really enjoying it.

Good for you for encouraging thinking outside the (candy) box!


- W