The mode is the most frequent observation in a data sample, to simplify you can say that is the most common number in a list
Before I will show you how to use python mode function, let's understand how it works first
First you need to find out what is the most common nr. You can have 1 or more common numbers in a list
Most common number in data list is 1
data = [1,2,3,4,1,2,3,1]
Let's get the total count of all numbers and store it in a dict
#define an empty dict
data_count = {}
# take each number from data list and use the data_count dict to count it
for nr in data:
#if is not the first time I add to data_count then it means data_count exist so I can add 1
if nr in data_count:
data_count[nr] += 1
else:
# else data[nr] does not exist, so let's start by putting 1
data_count[nr] = 1
Now print data_count dict
You can see that 1 is repeating 3 times, 2 is repeating 2 times, 3 is repeating 2 times and 4 only once
1 is most frequent, so 1 is the mode
As I said keep in mind that you can have more then a single mode for example
data = [1,2,1,2,3]
in this case you can see that 1 and 2 is the mode
The list it happens to be numbers but it can be any data, even string
In order to simplify your life you should use statistics. Statistics is a buildin python library, all you have to do is to make sure you import it
Import statistics
#if you want to return multiple modes then you can use the multimode method
the_mode = statistics.multimode(data)
#if you want to get the first single mode
the_mode = statistics.mode(data)
print(the_mode)
You can use scipy if you have an older version of python
Make sure you install the scipy before you use it
#pip install scipy
from scipy import stats
data = [0,1,8,9,5,3,10,2,2,5]
print(stats.mode(data))
The mode method will return the mode and the count of the mode
ModeResult(mode=array([2]), count=array([2]))