Finding the most common value in an array of enums

[JorgeF]

Hello,

I'm looking for an elegant way of finding the most common value in an array of enums

My enum being:

0 - Close

1 - Open

2 - Undefined

For instance, if my array contains:

Close, Close, Open, Close, Close, Open.

The most common value would be "Close"

I have created a very customized VI that allows me to obtain the desired result, but I'm really not proud of doing it this way, simply because I would have to modify it if I were to add a new value to my enum...

If someone can share some ideas to enlighten me, I would REALLY appreciate it.

Thanks in advance!

[I_Love_LabView]

Can you simply ask for the median of the array?

[Darin.K]

If you have the full version, I would ignore the coercion dots and use the Mode.vi.

[JorgeF]

The median does not do what I want.
I have tried the mode VI and it works fine, but makes my app much larger and long to compile. I would like to avoid using it if possible.

[Darin.K]

There is always the brute force method:

[Mark_Yedinak]

If the array is not too large where a copy would be an issue you could always sort the array and use a search to look at the index where each one starts. Your loop would probably require fewer iterations than the brute force method.

[JorgeF]

@Mark

The array could be very very large sometimes. I'll run some benchmarks to check for performance issues,  but your method is pretty darn good nonetheless, thank you 🙂

@Darin

Brute force or not, it is far better from what I've created, thank you!

[Darin.K · Accepted solution]

I am not sure I would go the sorting route, it could in priniciple save a single iteration since you know 0 is the first starting point, but you then have to deal with determining lengths, and dealing with missing values which return -1, etc.

If you really expect very large arrays, I would shift from my previous version which is meant to be quick to write to another simple method of counting. 

[Mark_Yedinak]

Here is the variant using the search method. This method will run N-1 times where N is the number of ENUM elements. Yes, it is a bit more complex than the brute force method but it would execute fairly quickly. The sort would probably be the time consuming task.

[Mark_Yedinak]

Follow up. At face value it seems like the search method would be faster and it is provided you ignore the sort time. The overall performance is better with the with the brute force method. A test of an array with 1000000 elements showed the brute force method took 9 ms. The search method took 98 ms. However 94 ms of that time was the sort.