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I guess some of the difficulty here is semantic. When I first read the post it did not occur to me that a user wanting to know what the most frequent values are, in terms of most frequent, second m.f., third m.f., ... tenth m.f. should think about modes. Surely the mode is THE m.f. value, and we often speak of a distribution being bimodal or even multi-modal. But the use of the term 'modes' to represent, say, the 100 most frequently occurring given names among those born in 2008 is not obvious to me.
Nevertheless, it is a very good thing that Nick's -modes- might answer that question!
Cheers
Kit
On Nov 18, 2009, at 2:33 AM, statalist-digest wrote:
> There is no guarantee that questioners use the most appropriate word, but "most frequent" might suggest "mode" to many statistically-minded people.
Kit Baum | Boston College Economics & DIW Berlin | http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Stata Programming | http://www.stata-press.com/books/isp.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata | http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html
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