eli5: What is multimodal distribution? With examples, please 🙂
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You familiar with a bell curve? One bump that spreads out. Multi-modal distributions have multiple bumps, usually because of different (or perhaps periodic) causes.
An example is motorcycle fatalities. If you plot out motorcycle fatalities by age, you get two bumps (a bi-modal distribution). One bump is in the low 20s and one bump is around 50. If you were to dig deeper, you could split up the data by accident type. Then you’d see a bunch of young folks with sport bikes going too fast into the sides of cars and a bunch of midlife gentlemen buying their cruisers and riding them to a bar to meet with like-minded fellas once a month only to forget how to counter-steer on the way home and turning right off the road when the road turned left.
Another (this time, completely made up) example is the lifespan of an iPhone. Number of phones broken vs time of ownership. I saw a lot of videos of people opening their iPhone only to immediately drop it on the pavement. There’s another bump right around a year when the new model comes out and spoiled little brats break their phone so that they need a new one. This annual spike repeats with some decay (fewer and fewer phones survive to the next year).
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