modec¶

Purpose¶

Computes the mode of every column of a matrix.

Format¶

m = modec(x)¶

Parameters:: x (NxK matrix) – data
Returns:: m (Kx1 matrix) – contains the mode of every column of x.

Examples¶

Basic example¶

// Create a 5x1 column vector
x = { 3,
      4,
      4,
      3,
      3 };

// Compute the mode of this column
m = modec(x);

After the code above, m is equal to:

Multi-column mode from credit dataset¶

This example will load the variables, Cards, Age and Education from the dataset credit.dat and find the mode of each variable.

// Create the file name with full path
fname = getGAUSSHome() $+ "examples/credit.dat";

// Load three variables by name
X = loadd(fname, "Cards + Age + Education");

// Compute the mode of each of the
// three columns in 'X'
m = modec(X);

After the code above, m will equal:

 2
44
16

Which tells us that for our sample, the most common:

number of credit cards owned is 2.
age is 44 years old.
number of years of education is 16.

Remarks¶

If two more more numbers are tied for the most appearances, then modec() will select the smallest of them.
modec() will not count missing values. However, if a column contains only missing values, a missing value will be returned, indicating that no valid numbers were found.
To find the mode of the entire matrix, use the vecr() command to turn the matrix into a column vector before calling modec.
m = modec(vecr(x));
To find out how many times each value is present, use counts().
To compute the mode for subgroups of a variable, use aggregate().