Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Statistical Analysis With Excel For Dummies (Notes: Mode)

One more measure of central tendency is important.  This one is the score that occurs most frequently in a group of scores it's called the mode.

If two scores are tied for occurring most frequently, your set of data is bimodal.

If you have a set of scores that all occur equally, there's no mode.

Sometimes the mode is the most representative measure of central tendency.  Imagine a small company that consists of 30 consultants and two high ranking officers.  Each consultant has an annual salary of 40K.  Each officer has an annual salary of 250K.  The mean salary of this company is $53,125.

Does the mean give you a clear picture of the company's salary?  No really, you're better off if you consider the mode which is $40,000.

Use Excel's MODE.SNGL to find a single mode.  Use MODE.MULT if there's more than one mode.  If you don't know how many modes there are, use MODE.MULT.  The worst that could happen is you wind up with error message in some of the cells of the results array.


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