How to find the statistical mode?

Question

In R, mean() and median() are standard functions which do what you\'d expect. mode() tells you the internal storage mode of the objec

Answer 1

A small modification to Ken Williams' answer, adding optional params na.rm and return_multiple.

Unlike the answers relying on names(), this answer maintains the data type of x in the returned value(s).

stat_mode <- function(x, return_multiple = TRUE, na.rm = FALSE) {
  if(na.rm){
    x <- na.omit(x)
  }
  ux <- unique(x)
  freq <- tabulate(match(x, ux))
  mode_loc <- if(return_multiple) which(freq==max(freq)) else which.max(freq)
  return(ux[mode_loc])
}

To show it works with the optional params and maintains data type:

foo <- c(2L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 4L, 5L, NA, NA)
bar <- c('mouse','mouse','dog','cat','cat','bird',NA,NA)

str(stat_mode(foo)) # int [1:3] 2 4 NA
str(stat_mode(bar)) # chr [1:3] "mouse" "cat" NA
str(stat_mode(bar, na.rm=T)) # chr [1:2] "mouse" "cat"
str(stat_mode(bar, return_mult=F, na.rm=T)) # chr "mouse"

Thanks to @Frank for simplification.