One very popular question to ask about univariate data is, What is the typical value? or What's the value around which the data are centered? To answer these questions, we have to measure the central tendency of a set of data.
We've seen one measure of central tendency already: the mode. The mtcars$carburetors
data subset was bimodal, with a two and four carburetor setup being the most popular. The mode is the central tendency measure that is applicable to categorical data.
The mode of a discretized continuous distribution is usually considered to be the interval that contains the highest frequency of data points. This makes it dependent on the method and parameters of the binning. Finding the mode of data from a non-discretized continuous distribution is a more complicated procedure, which we'll see later.
Perhaps the most famous and commonly used measure of central tendency is the mean. The mean is the sum of a set of numerics divided by the number of elements in that set...