eli5: What is multimodal distribution? With examples, please 🙂
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Consider height. Adult women are about five inches shorter than adult men. If you look at just the distribution of women’s height, it’s a normal distribution – many clustered around the mean, few at the extremes. Likewise, if you look at just the distribution of men’s height, it’s a normal distribution.
But if you look at the distribution of all human height, you end up with a bimodal distribution. The mode (most common value) of female height is about five inches less than the mode of male height while the variance is roughly the same. Adding them together preserves these two modes, thus ‘bimodal’ or ‘multimodal’.
In general, when you see multimodal distributions in real world data, it implies that you’re combining two or more distributions that have different characteristics.
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