Mode of votes loop

user_15119680 0
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I'm facing a problem with an game that i'm working on. In this game, players need to choose a number and vote. So let's say that 5 players are playing, when they vote and the votation ends, the game returns the mode of the votes. I can get the mode with max(set(int_list), key=int_list.count) where int_list is a list that i'm using to store the votes.

But if the votes list is something like [1,1,2,2,3] or [1,1,2,2] I get 1 as the mode, but I'd like a condition to check theses cases and return a message "inconclusive mode" or something like that.

The mode is the value that appears most often in a set of data values.

How can i make this condition? I'm using Python btw

algorithm python
3 Answers

We can use a couple of for loops for this, since your list is so short. Let us assume that the votes were casted as:

votes = [1, 1, 2, 2, 3]

First, count the votes by accumulating the count in each "bin":

vote_count = dict()
for vote in votes:
    if vote not in vote_count:
        vote_count[vote] = 0
    vote_count[vote] += 1  # Vote for 1 go to position 0, and so on
# `vote_count` will be equal to `{1: 2, 2: 2, 3: 1}`

Then, find the maximum number of votes that any option received:

max_votes = max(vote_count.values())
# `max_votes` will be equal to `2`

Finally, find all the options that got that number of votes:

winning_values = [vote for vote, n in vote_count.items() if n == max_votes]
# Remember, votes for 1 were on position 0

You can check if a tie happened with this condition:

if len(winning_values) > 1:
    print("There was a tie")
user_32810970

The Counter class from collections is very useful for this.

from collections import Counter

votes = [1, 1, 2, 2, 3]

(a,count1),(_,count2) = Counter(votes).most_common(2)
if count1 == count2:
    print("inconclusive mode")
else:
    print("mode is",a)

It also has the advantage that it is also very fast at what it does (counting things).

user_81117550

The standard library has statistics.multimode, which can be used in your case:

try:
    mode, = statistics.multimode(int_list)
except ValueError:
    print('inconclusive mode')
else:
    print(mode)

It also has statistics.mode, which returns the first mode like the code you showed us (except in linear rather than quadratic time).

user_5732550
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