# Mode testing, critical bandwidth and excess mass

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05188 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05188/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [UniForCE: The Unimodality Forest Method for Clustering and Estimation of the Number of Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11323/) (2023)
- [Bayesian taut splines for estimating the number of modes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05825/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The identification of peaks or maxima in probability densities, by mode testing or bump hunting, has become an important problem in applied fields. This task has been approached in the statistical literature from different perspectives, with the proposal of testing procedures which are based on kernel density estimators or on the quantification of excess mass. However, none of the existing proposals provides a satisfactory performance in practice. In this work, a new procedure which combines the previous approaches (smoothing and excess mass) is presented and compared with the existing methods, showing a superior behaviour. A real data example on philatelic data is also included for illustration purposes.