Find Mode

Unit 2 Session 2 (Click for link to problem statements)

U-nderstand

Understand what the interviewer is asking for by using test cases and questions about the problem.

• What should my program do if the list is empty?
  • In that case, return None.

P-lan

Plan the solution with appropriate visualizations and pseudocode.

General Idea: Create an occurrence dict counting how many times each element appears in the list, and also keep track of the highest occurrence so far.

1) Create an empty dict to store the occurrences
2) Assume max_count is 0, most_frequent is None
3) For each number in the list
  a) Is the number in the occurrences dict?
      i) If yes, increment count by 1
     ii) Otherwise, map number -> 1
  b) Regardless, check if this is our new max_count
     i) If so, update max_count and most_frequent
4) Return the most_frequent 

I-mplement

def find_mode(lst):
    frequency_map = {}
    max_count = 0
    most_frequent = None
    for num in lst:
        if num in frequency_map:
	    frequency_map[num] += 1
	else:
	    frequency_map[num] = 1			  
        if frequency_map[num] > max_count:
            max_count = frequency_map[num]
            most_frequent = num
    return most_frequent