pandas: How to get the most frequent item in pandas series?

Question

How can I get the most frequent item in a pandas series?

Consider the series s

s = pd.Series(\"1 5 3 3 3 5 2 1 8 10 2 3 3 3         


        

Answer 1

pandas.factorize and numpy.bincount

This is very similar to @jezrael's Numpy answer. The difference is the use of factorize and not numpy.unique

• factorize returns an integer factorization and unique values
• bincount counts how many of each unique value
• argmax identifies which bin or factor is the most fequent
• Use the position of the bin returned from argmax to reference the most frequent value from the array of unique values

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i, r = s.factorize()
r[np.bincount(i).argmax()]

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