How to Retrieve the value Mode

Question

The goal is to retrieve a mode based on the column and its data.

data <- data.frame(test=c("a","b","c","a","a","a","a","c","c","c","c","c","c"))

Is there an R built-in function or standard way to calculate the mode of data$test?

"How is the mode of a list of characters defined? " I don't understand your question. — HelloWorld1, Oct 12 '14 at 12:57
Here's another [option](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19982938/how-to-find-the-most-frequent-values-across-several-columns-containing-factors) — , Oct 12 '14 at 13:04

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 12 '14 at 13:23

2

table(data$test)

#a b c 
#5 1 7 


table(data$test)==max(table(data$test))

#    a     b     c 
#FALSE FALSE  TRUE

or

names(table(data$tes)[table(data$test)==max(table(data$test))])
#[1] "c"

answered Oct 12 '14 at 13:23

germcd

I don't understand. What does "max(table(data$test))" do? – HelloWorld1 Oct 12 '14 at 13:57
@FullMetalGame it's the number of times the mode occurs which in this case is 7 – germcd Oct 12 '14 at 14:03
1

@RichardScriven - `which.max()` does not handle solutions where there are multiple modes, which is not an issue here - but could very well be the case in other datasets. – Chase Oct 12 '14 at 16:06

1 Answers1