In Python, I have a list:
L = [1, 2, 45, 55, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5456, 56, 6, 7, 67]
I want to identify the item that occurred the highest number of times. I am able to solve it but I need the fastest way to do so. I know there is a nice Pythonic answer to this.
I am surprised no-one has mentioned the simplest solution,max()
with the key list.count
:
max(lst,key=lst.count)
Example:
>>> lst = [1, 2, 45, 55, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5456, 56, 6, 7, 67]
>>> max(lst,key=lst.count)
4
This works in Python 3 or 2, but note that it only returns the most frequent item and not also the frequency. Also, in the case of a draw (i.e. joint most frequent item) only a single item is returned.
Although the time complexity of using max()
is worse than using Counter.most_common(1)
as PM 2Ring comments, the approach benefits from a rapid C
implementation and I find this approach is fastest for short lists but slower for larger ones (Python 3.6 timings shown in IPython 5.3):
In [1]: from collections import Counter
...:
...: def f1(lst):
...: return max(lst, key = lst.count)
...:
...: def f2(lst):
...: return Counter(lst).most_common(1)
...:
...: lst0 = [1,2,3,4,3]
...: lst1 = lst0[:] * 100
...:
In [2]: %timeit -n 10 f1(lst0)
10 loops, best of 3: 3.32 us per loop
In [3]: %timeit -n 10 f2(lst0)
10 loops, best of 3: 26 us per loop
In [4]: %timeit -n 10 f1(lst1)
10 loops, best of 3: 4.04 ms per loop
In [5]: %timeit -n 10 f2(lst1)
10 loops, best of 3: 75.6 us per loop