Mode

[Bowen]

I'm looking for a script or algoritm which generates the mode for a group of numbers (each from its own record).

[Ender]

What do you mean by "each from its own record"?

[Leader]

Are we doing homework here?

 

The MODE is simply the number(s) that occur(s) most often within a group of numbers. This is a general math topic of course.

 

You could obviously construct a brute-force approach to count the numbers and select the most frequent.

 

A more elegant approach might be to use a combination of summary fields and calc fields to isolate the most frequent number.

[comment]

It's not that easy, but before we get into it, could we have some more details, please? Like what do you want to return in case of bimodal/multimodal set?

[Bowen99]

I am summarizing test scores. Each test has nine questions. Each question has a result of 0 to 4. I am currently able to report the avegare score for each question but I want to report the mode for each question.

 

Each students scores comprise one record. In a table the data would look like "student name" "Question 1 score" "question 2 score" etc.

In a trailing summary I can disply the average score for each question. I want to display the mode as well.

[comment]

I am afraid you did not answer my question. Let's say there are 7 students and their respective scores for Question 1 are: 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 4, 4.

 

Note that 0, 1 and 4 have the same frequency.

 

What is the value you want to display as mode in such case?

[Bowen]

Your questions have helped me out! I think I'll have to report the frequency of each of the five possible responses. I can script a find and count each of the responses.

Thanks