R help - Jan 2004 - Measures of central tendency - mode

Greetings,

This seems too rudimentary to ask but for the life of me I cannot locate a
readily easy method to compute the univariate mode.  I know "mode" is
not correct and "table" provides a reasonable count but I figured
there would be an easy way to extract the value from the table after I do
something like:

max(table(mydadat$myvar))

unfortunately it only returns the max count and not the value that is observed
most.  Would some kind soul help me out with this seemingly trivial problem?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Patrick

Thanks to Andy Liaw and J.R. Lockwood for your suggestions.  The which.max()
worked great along with the rownames.  The complete solution for me was:

a <- table(varname)
> my.mode <- rownames(a)[which.max(a)]
> my.mode
[1] "1"

Amazing how a simple concept such as mode can present problems for us.  Thanks
again.

To reply to Spencer Graves' question, I didn't find the disucssion via
search.  I guess I might have overlooked the thread if it were titled kernel
density since that seemed far too technical for this basic topic.  Sorry if I
cluttered up the list though.

Cheers,

Patrick


On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 16:47:54 -0500 (EST)
"J.R. Lockwood" <lockwood at rand.org> wrote:
> it is an annoyance that table() provides the values being tables as
> the rownames of the resultant vector.  you can do something like:
> 
> a<-table(x)
> rownames(a)[which.max(a)]
> 
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Patrick E. McKnight wrote:
> 
> > Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 13:55:19 -0700
> > From: Patrick E. McKnight <pem at theriver.com>
> > To: "r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch" <r-help at
stat.math.ethz.ch>
> > Subject: [R] Measures of central tendency - mode
> > 
> > Greetings,
> > 
> > This seems too rudimentary to ask but for the life of me I cannot
locate a readily easy method to compute the univariate mode.  I know
"mode" is not correct and "table" provides a reasonable
count but I figured there would be an easy way to extract the value from the
table after I do something like:
> > 
> > max(table(mydadat$myvar))
> > 
> > unfortunately it only returns the max count and not the value that is
observed most.  Would some kind soul help me out with this seemingly trivial
problem?
> > 
> > Thanks in advance.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Patrick
> > 
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide!
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > 
> 
> J.R. Lockwood
> 412-683-2300 x4941
> lockwood at rand.org
> http://www.rand.org/methodology/stat/members/lockwood/
>