The mode-function in Matlab returns the value that occurs most frequently in a dataset. But "when there are multiple values occurring equally frequently, mode returns the smallest of those values."
This is not very useful for what i am using it for, i would rather have it return a median, or arithmetic mean in the absence of a modal value (as they are at least somewhat in the middle of the distibution). Otherwise the results of using mode are far too much on the low side of the scale (i have a lot of unique values in my distribution).
Is there an elegant way to make mode favor more central values in a dataset (in the absence of a true modal value)?
btw.: i know i could use [M,F] = mode(X, ...), to manually check for the most frequent value (and calculate a median or mean when necessary). But that seems like a bit of an awkward solution, since i would be almost entirely rewriting everything that mode is supposed to be doing. I'm hoping that there's a more elegant solution.
Looks like you want the third output argument from mode. EG:
x = [1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 6 7 8];
[m,f,c] = mode(x);
valueYouWant = median(c{1});
Or (since median takes the average of values when there are an even number of entries), in the cases where an even number of values may have the same max number of occurrences, maybe do something like this:
valueYouWant = c{1}(ceil(length(c{1})/2))