Replies

[grey_whiskers #319] With the small sample set I was talking about, (you, neighbor, and Gates), there wouldn't BE a mode strictly speaking.
[Woodpusher #321] Strictly speaking, there is always a mode and in your chosen example there are three modes. You are still making it up as you go along.
[grey_whiskers #324] Not making it up, just not typing coherently. The internet does not handle inflections well, and merely emphasizing the word "BE" didn't convey my point. I should have emphasized "A" instead of "BE": not a unique value of the mode, corresponding to one value within the set which is guaranteed to appear more often than all the others.
But that would've been too cumbersome to explain on my third straight night of four hours sleep.

That would change your #319 from:

[grey_whiskers #319] With the small sample set I was talking about, (you, neighbor, and Gates), there wouldn't BE a mode strictly speaking.

to the equally useless:

[grey_whiskers #319 reimagined] With the small sample set I was talking about, (you, neighbor, and Gates), there wouldn't be A mode strictly speaking.

Unfortunately, not even an irrelevant digression into an eigenvalue subroutine four layers down dying from a divide-by-zero error can rescue your claim of blithering nonsense about mode values. Whether you emphasize A or BE, your chosen example wit three values, all different, is multimodal and useless.

[Woodpusher #321, replying to grey_whiskers #319]

"In this study, 541 individuals were identified who died of fentanyl-induced overdose in New Hampshire from January 1, 2015 to September 30, 2016."

[emphasis in original]

I quoted the report to identify the specific number of individuals in the study and provided a link to the report itself.

Regardless of the number of subjects in the study which I provided, your chosen example would have been useless for demonstrating anything about mode values.

Grouping
In some cases (such as when all values appear the same number of times) the mode is not useful.

Id. You made up an example where mode is not useful. It was not easy to make up an example where mode is not useful, but you were up to the task.

Whether you emphasize A or BE, you still have the same problem. All your chosen values appear the same number of times (ONCE) and the mode of your chosen data is not useful. Like you unending excuses.

You're foaming at the mouth, child. I gave a real-world example in which it made a difference whether you a single maximum value, or not. So it wasn't made up as you claimed. You are pretending it was an excuse to cover not knowing what it was; but it was fatigue. My error on the fentanyl study was that I misread it entirely due to fatigue, missing the N entirely and getting the value of the mean wrong by a factor of four.

I freely admit screwing up my read on the fentanyl study. It happens when you're tired.

I did manage 9 hours of sleep last night, following a late afternoon 2 1/2 hour nap. And the God-awful work project which kept me up for a number of days till 2-3 in the morning is finished, so I am about 1/3 of the way back to being human.

As Ferris Bueller's recording said, "We appreciate your concern for our welfare."