Question

I am not sure if CopyMost is the correct term to use here, but it’s the term my client used (“CopyMost Data Protocol”). Sounds like he wants the mode? I have a set of data:

Increment    Value
.02            1
.04            1
.06            1
.08            2
.10            2

I need to return which Value occurs the most “CopyMost”. In this case, the value is 1. Right now I had planned on writing an Extension Method for IEnumerable to do this for integer values. Is there something built into Linq that already does this easily? Or is it best for me to write an extension method that would look something like this

records.CopyMost(x => x.Value);

EDIT

Looks like I am looking for the modal average. I’ve provided an updated answer that allows for a tiebreaker condition. It’s meant to be used like this, and is generic.

records.CopyMost(x => x.Value, x => x == 0);

In this case x.Value would be an int, and if the the count of 0s was the same as the counts of 1s and 3s, it would tiebreak on 0.

Answer 1

Well, here’s one option:

var query = (from item in data
             group 1 by item.Value into g
             orderby g.Count() descending
             select g.Key).First();

Basically we’re using GroupBy to group by the value – but all we’re interested in for each group is the size of the group and the key (which is the original value). We sort the groups by size, and take the first element (the one with the most elements).

Does that help?