What type of distribution has two prominent peaks?

A distribution characterized by two prominent peaks is known as bimodal. This term indicates that there are two modes, or values, that occur with the highest frequency within the dataset. In many practical scenarios, a bimodal distribution can reflect two distinct groups or phenomena being present in the data.

For instance, if you were measuring the test scores of students from two separate classes that had completely different performance levels, the resulting distribution might show peaks where each class's performance clusters. Understanding bimodal distributions is essential in statistics, as they can indicate the presence of two underlying processes or populations contributing to the collected data.

Unimodal refers to distributions with a single peak, while multimodal applies to distributions with more than two peaks. The normal distribution, specifically, is a type of unimodal distribution shaped like a bell curve, having only one central peak. Thus, the defining feature of two peaks aligns specifically with the concept of a bimodal distribution.