Mode

The mode of a set of numbers is the number in the set that occurs most frequently.

One may prefer using this method to finding the average of a set of numbers over mean and median because if a certain number occurs many times in the set, that value is the most popular of all the others.

For example, say I did an experiment to see how many pairs of shoes my friends each owned on average and it came up that seven out of the ten friends that I tested owned four pairs of shoes. It would be best to use the mode (which would be 4) for the average and say that on average, my friends each owned four pairs of shoes. In the case that one of them had a shoe fetish and owned thirteen pairs, this would be better than taking the mean of the amount of shoes each owned. In that instance, the mean would be much higher than the true average should be.