Simplest way to find the element that occurs the most in each column

Question

Suppose I have

data =
[[a, a, c],
 [b, c, c],
 [c, b, b],
 [b, a, c]]

I want to get a list containing the element that occurs the most in each

Answer 1

Here's a solution without using the collections module

def get_most_common(data):

    data = zip(*data)
    count_dict = {}
    common = []
    for col in data:
        for val in col:
            count_dict[val] = count_dict.get(val, 0) + 1
        max_count = max([count_dict[key] for key in count_dict])
        common.append(filter(lambda k: count_dict[k] == max_count, count_dict))

    return common

if __name__ == "__main__":

    data = [['a','a','b'],
            ['b','c','c'],
            ['a','b','b'],
            ['b','a','c']]

    print get_most_common(data)