8.7: The Mode

Sometimes we wish to describe the central tendency of a dataset that is not numeric. For example, let’s say that we want to know which models of iPhone are most commonly used. Let’s say we ask a large group of iPhone users which model each one owns. If we were to take the average of these values, we would see that the mean iPhone model is 9.51, which is clearly nonsensical, since the iPhone model numbers are not meant to be quantitative measurements. In this case, a more appropriate measure of central tendency is the mode, which is the most common value in the dataset, as we discussed above.