Study of statistics is all about collecting, arranging and interpretation of data. Data could be scientific observations, survey, or public opinion as we see in case of elections in democratic system.
One must know there are number of properties in study of statistics to interpreted data,like mean ,median, mode, variance and standard deviation. So what kind of property require to elect someone during elections? By making a choice among mean ,median and mode one can easily come to result that public opinion we get in terms of election are purely one choice based, as a voter can not say he is 60% with candidate A and 40% with candidate B. A voter has choose one the candidate between candidate A and B. You can not take mean of candidate A and B,thus Mode fits best in this case.
Even median also can not tell you about frequency of data. In this way Mode comes in story which is all about most repeated value from the group of data or we can say most popular value from a system of data.
Suppose there are 30 Students in a class and and a class representative has to be elected from candidates A, B and C. following pattern of voter slip is found inside ballot box (you don't need to count)
A A A C C B B A B A C A B C A B A C C C C C C C A C C C B B
As we see C is the most popular candidate among all them, appearing 14 times our mode(winner) is C. 'Mode' is Mr. Narendra Modi for Indian General Election 2014, 'Mode' is Barak Obama for US Presidential Election 2012.
It was a simple examples of statistical term Mode, but not that simple since election is National or International level phenomenon usually occurring in 4 or 5 years.
Here is another application of Mode we use everyday without even knowing it. A practical example might go like this. If you want to buy a new phone, you ask your friends on what they are using. Say you asked ten of them. You came to know that 5 of them are using the same phone(let Samsung) and 3 of them are using some other type(iPhone?) and rest 2 of them are using some other phones. Assuming all of them are happy with their phones. You might think buying the one which is used by more number of people. In this way Mode proves to be a daily life phenomenon.
Calculation of Mode in case of bar graphs become more easier as the most frequent appearing value is the tallest bar, for example
EmoticonEmoticon