python - Find the item with maximum occurrences in a list

Question

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Answer 1

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