How to find the statistical mode?

There is package modeest which provide estimators of the mode of univariate unimodal (and sometimes multimodal) data and values of the modes of usual probability distributions.

mySamples <- c(19, 4, 5, 7, 29, 19, 29, 13, 25, 19)

library(modeest)
mlv(mySamples, method = "mfv")

Mode (most likely value): 19 
Bickel's modal skewness: -0.1 
Call: mlv.default(x = mySamples, method = "mfv")

For more information see this page


One more solution, which works for both numeric & character/factor data:

Mode <- function(x) {
  ux <- unique(x)
  ux[which.max(tabulate(match(x, ux)))]
}

On my dinky little machine, that can generate & find the mode of a 10M-integer vector in about half a second.

If your data set might have multiple modes, the above solution takes the same approach as which.max, and returns the first-appearing value of the set of modes. To return all modes, use this variant (from @digEmAll in the comments):

Modes <- function(x) {
  ux <- unique(x)
  tab <- tabulate(match(x, ux))
  ux[tab == max(tab)]
}

found this on the r mailing list, hope it's helpful. It is also what I was thinking anyways. You'll want to table() the data, sort and then pick the first name. It's hackish but should work.

names(sort(-table(x)))[1]