Least occurring element in vector R

Question

If I have a vector

vec = c('a','a','a','b','b','c','c','c','c','c')

Is there a simple way to find the least occurring element in vec? Thanks!

Edit: is there a simple way to do it with characters?

The answer I gave should not have depended on the vector being numeric. — IRTFM, Jan 10 '12 at 18:56

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 10 '12 at 18:47

4

This should work, even if more than one of the elements is tied as the least frequent item:

vec = c(1,1,1,2,2,3,3,3,3,3)

f <- table(vec)
as.numeric(names(f[f == min(f)]))
# [1] 2

answered Jan 10 '12 at 18:47

Josh O'Brien

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

3

table(vec)[which.min(table(vec))]

(In all likelihood a duplicate, although I have searched. Found what seemed to be similar on the max side: Create a variable capturing the most frequent occurence by group Maybe it sounds familiar to that one 'cuz I posted an answer?)

edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

Community

answered Jan 10 '12 at 18:47

IRTFM

I was thinking of comparing elapsed time for this vs. `min(hist(charto8bit(vec))$counts)` but thought that would be a candidate for thedailywtf's Code SOD :-) – Carl Witthoft Jan 10 '12 at 19:16

2 Answers2