Find the most common element in a list

Without the requirement about the lowest index, you can use collections.Counter for this:

from collections import Counter

a = [1936, 2401, 2916, 4761, 9216, 9216, 9604, 9801] 

c = Counter(a)

print(c.most_common(1)) # the one most common element... 2 would mean the 2 most common
[(9216, 2)] # a set containing the element, and it's count in 'a'

I am doing this using scipy stat module and lambda:

import scipy.stats
lst = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,5]
most_freq_val = lambda x: scipy.stats.mode(x)[0][0]
print(most_freq_val(lst))

Result:

 most_freq_val = 5

Simple one line solution

moc= max([(lst.count(chr),chr) for chr in set(lst)])

It will return most frequent element with its frequency.

Building on Luiz's answer, but satisfying the "in case of draws the item with the lowest index should be returned" condition:

from statistics import mode, StatisticsError

def most_common(l):
    try:
        return mode(l)
    except StatisticsError as e:
        # will only return the first element if no unique mode found
        if 'no unique mode' in e.args[0]:
            return l[0]
        # this is for "StatisticsError: no mode for empty data"
        # after calling mode([])
        raise

Example:

>>> most_common(['a', 'b', 'b'])
'b'
>>> most_common([1, 2])
1
>>> most_common([])
StatisticsError: no mode for empty data

ans  = [1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1]
all_ans = {ans.count(ans[i]): ans[i] for i in range(len(ans))}
print(all_ans)

all_ans={4: 1, 2: 0}
max_key = max(all_ans.keys())

4

print(all_ans[max_key])

1

#This will return the list sorted by frequency:

def orderByFrequency(list):

    listUniqueValues = np.unique(list)
    listQty = []
    listOrderedByFrequency = []
    
    for i in range(len(listUniqueValues)):
        listQty.append(list.count(listUniqueValues[i]))
    for i in range(len(listQty)):
        index_bigger = np.argmax(listQty)
        for j in range(listQty[index_bigger]):
            listOrderedByFrequency.append(listUniqueValues[index_bigger])
        listQty[index_bigger] = -1
    return listOrderedByFrequency

#And this will return a list with the most frequent values in a list:

def getMostFrequentValues(list):
    
    if (len(list) <= 1):
        return list
    
    list_most_frequent = []
    list_ordered_by_frequency = orderByFrequency(list)
    
    list_most_frequent.append(list_ordered_by_frequency[0])
    frequency = list_ordered_by_frequency.count(list_ordered_by_frequency[0])
    
    index = 0
    while(index < len(list_ordered_by_frequency)):
        index = index + frequency
        
        if(index < len(list_ordered_by_frequency)):
            testValue = list_ordered_by_frequency[index]
            testValueFrequency = list_ordered_by_frequency.count(testValue)
            
            if (testValueFrequency == frequency):
                list_most_frequent.append(testValue)
            else:
                break    
    
    return list_most_frequent

#tests:
print(getMostFrequentValues([]))
print(getMostFrequentValues([1]))
print(getMostFrequentValues([1,1]))
print(getMostFrequentValues([2,1]))
print(getMostFrequentValues([2,2,1]))
print(getMostFrequentValues([1,2,1,2]))
print(getMostFrequentValues([1,2,1,2,2]))
print(getMostFrequentValues([3,2,3,5,6,3,2,2]))
print(getMostFrequentValues([1,2,2,60,50,3,3,50,3,4,50,4,4,60,60]))

Results:
[]
[1]
[1]
[1, 2]
[2]
[1, 2]
[2]
[2, 3]
[3, 4, 50, 60]

def most_frequent(List):

    counter = 0

    num = List[0]

 

    for i in List:

        curr_frequency = List.count(i)

        if(curr_frequency> counter):

            counter = curr_frequency

            num = i


    return num


List = [2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 3]

print(most_frequent(List))

def mostCommonElement(list):
  count = {} // dict holder
  max = 0 // keep track of the count by key
  result = None // holder when count is greater than max
  for i in list:
    if i not in count:
      count[i] = 1
    else:
      count[i] += 1
    if count[i] > max:
      max = count[i]
      result = i
  return result

mostCommonElement(["a","b","a","c"]) -> "a"

The most common element should be the one which is appearing more than N/2 times in the array where N being the len(array). The below technique will do it in O(n) time complexity, with just consuming O(1) auxiliary space.

from collections import Counter

def majorityElement(arr):        
    majority_elem = Counter(arr)
    size = len(arr)
    for key, val in majority_elem.items():
        if val > size/2:
            return key
    return -1