Why doesn't base R have a function for mode?

eoppe1022 · January 18, 2019, 2:30am

I was just thinking of calculating the mode for something, and I remembered that base R doesn't have a function for calculating the mode.

Is there a reason why?

I know there's a function base::mode() that is totally unrelated to the statistical mode, so the statistical mode would need a different function name, but that doesn't seem like it would be such a big issue.

rensa · January 18, 2019, 2:39am

I'm not sure, @eoppe1022! But here's an implementation of the statistical mode that seems pretty robust:

eoppe1022 · January 18, 2019, 2:51am

Yeah I was looking at that earlier, @rensa. Looks like a great solution. Though I'm still surprised there isn't a pre-built function for it.

Moody_Mudskipper · January 18, 2019, 9:16am

That has puzzled me as well, it's such a basic thing. Still better than standard SQL which doesn't have median :).

system · February 8, 2019, 9:16am

This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

If you have a query related to it or one of the replies, start a new topic and refer back with a link.