fastmode

Optimized high speed version of statistical mode, i.e. element(s) occuring at greatest frequency

fastmode is an improvement on 'mode.m' by Michael Robbins (File ID 5266). It ignores NaN's and properly returns multiple results if more than one element occurs at equal frequency.

M-file profiler revealed extracting unique values took 50% of the time spent in the function, and since a list of unique values were not required, a work-around has been used that makes this even faster than the first submission (25 seconds to process a 100,000 element vector iterated 1,000 times, versus original 27 seconds and Robbins' hist-based version of 69 seconds).

The function is rather robust in that it can handle even single-element vectors, but it will generate an error if you attempt to call it with an empty vector. Since it's designed for speed, no error checking is performed on the input.