A multimodal distribution is a statistical distribution whose probability density function or probability mass function has more than one mode. A distribution with two modes is bimodal. For a continuous distribution, distinct local maxima of the density are generally counted as modes, with conventions needed for plateaus and boundary maxima. The number of modes does not merely equal the number of components in a mixture representation.
Multimodality can indicate that observations arise from several subpopulations, but a mixture distribution need not be multimodal, and a multimodal distribution need not have a unique mixture decomposition.
