Oddly, there seems to be no mode function in the python standard library. It feels like something that should have an optimized C version squirreled away somewhere. ‘Mode’ is too ambiguous to be easily searchable, alas. Anyway, here’s a will-have-to-do-for-now version:
from collections import defaultdict def mode(iterable): counts = defaultdict(int) for item in iterable: counts[item] += 1 return max(counts, key = counts.get)
Should be reasonably fast (for pure-python), though could eat up a lot of memory on an iterable contaning large items.