How to extract the first highest occurring value in an R data frame column?

The highest occurring value is called the mode and there can be multiple modes in a variable. If we have multiple modes then we can find the first mode or first highest occurring value by using sort function. For example, if we have a vector x that contains more than two modes then the first mode can be found as:

sort(table(df$x),decreasing=TRUE)[1]

Example

Consider the below data frame:

Live Demo

> set.seed(36521)
> x<-sample(LETTERS[1:5],20,replace=TRUE)
> df1<-data.frame(x)
> df1

Output

x
1 B
2 E
3 A
4 A
5 D
6 E
7 D
8 B
9 B
10 C
11 E
12 D
13 E
14 A
15 A
16 A
17 C
18 B
19 D
20 D

Finding the first mode in x:

> sort(table(df1$x),decreasing=TRUE)[1]

Output

A
5

Let’s have a look at another example:

Example

Live Demo

> y<-rpois(20,5)
> df2<-data.frame(y)
> df2

Output

y
1 5
2 7
3 4
4 7
5 1
6 4
7 7
8 10
9 4
10 4
11 6
12 5
13 6
14 5
15 4
16 2
17 4
18 6
19 5
20 1

Finding the first mode in y:

> sort(table(df2$y),decreasing=TRUE)[1]

Output

4
6

Nizamuddin Siddiqui

Updated on: 07-Nov-2020

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