eli5: What is multimodal distribution? With examples, please 🙂
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Other people have explained the base concept pretty well already, but for another example, the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone has a bimodal (two mode) distribution of minutes between eruptions – although eruptions can happen between 35 and 120 minutes after the last one, they tend to happen at either 50ish or 80ish minutes after the last eruption.
The reason for this is directly related to the previous eruption time (which is also bimodal). Eruptions last 1.5 to 5 seconds. When they are shorter, the break between eruptions isn’t as long. When they are longer, the break is also longer. So if you know how long the blast from the last eruption lasted, you can pretty easily predict when the next eruption will happen, but if you don’t know that information, you just know that the most likely wait time will be around 50 minutes or around 80 minutes.
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