Editing Multimodal distribution (section)

{{Short description|Probability distribution with more than one mode}}
{{redirect|Bimodal|the musical concept|Bimodality}}

[[Image:Bimodal.png|thumb|'''Figure 1.''' A simple bimodal distribution, in this case a [[mixture distribution|mixture]] of two [[normal distribution]]s with the same variance but different means.  The figure shows the [[probability density function]] (p.d.f.), which is an equally-weighted average of the bell-shaped p.d.f.s of the two normal distributions. If the weights were not equal, the resulting distribution could still be bimodal but with peaks of different heights.]]
[[File:Bimodal geological.PNG|thumb|'''Figure 2.''' A bimodal distribution.]]
[[Image:Bimodal-bivariate-small.png|thumb|'''Figure 3.''' A bivariate, multimodal distribution]]
[[File:Unimodal Nonmonotonic Distribution.png|thumb|alt=A 3D plot of a probability distribution. It ripples and spirals away from the origin, with only one local maximum near the origin.|'''Figure 4.''' A non-example: a ''[[unimodal]]'' distribution, that would become multimodal if conditioned on either x or y.]]

In [[statistics]], a '''multimodal''' '''distribution''' is a [[probability distribution]] with more than one [[mode (statistics)|mode]] (i.e., more than one local peak of the distribution). These appear as distinct peaks (local maxima) in the [[probability density function]], as shown in Figures 1 and 2. Categorical, continuous, and discrete data can all form multimodal distributions. Among univariate analyses, multimodal distributions are commonly bimodal.{{Citation needed|date=July 2022}}