Counting the frequencies in a list using dictionary in Python

Given an unsorted list of some elements(may or may not be integers), Find the frequency of each distinct element in the list using a dictionary.

Example:

Input : [1, 1, 1, 5, 5, 3, 1, 3, 3, 1,
                  4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2]
Output : 1 : 5
         2 : 4
         3 : 3
         4 : 3
         5 : 2
Explanation : Here 1 occurs 5 times, 2 
              occurs 4 times and so on...

The problem can be solved in many ways. A simple approach would be to iterate over the list and use each distinct element of the list as a key of the dictionary and store the corresponding count of that key as values. Below is the Python code for this approach:

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# Python program to count the frequency of 
# elements in a list using a dictionary
  
def CountFrequency(my_list):
  
    # Creating an empty dictionary 
    freq = {}
    for item in my_list:
        if (item in freq):
            freq[item] += 1
        else:
            freq[item] = 1
  
    for key, value in freq.items():
        print ("% d : % d"%(key, value))
  
# Driver function
if __name__ == "__main__": 
    my_list =[1, 1, 1, 5, 5, 3, 1, 3, 3, 1, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2]
  
    CountFrequency(my_list)

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Output:


 1 :  5
 2 :  4
 3 :  3
 4 :  3
 5 :  2





Time Complexity:O(N), where N is the length of the list.




Alternative way:An alternative approach can be to use the list.count() method. This makes the program much more compact without affecting the run time. Below is the Python code for this:











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# Python program to count the frequency of 


# elements in a list using a dictionary 


  


def CountFrequency(my_list): 


      


    # Creating an empty dictionary  


    freq = {} 


    for items in my_list: 


        freq[items] = my_list.count(items) 


      


    for key, value in freq.items(): 


        print ("% d : % d"%(key, value)) 


  


# Driver function 


if __name__ == "__main__":  


    my_list =[1, 1, 1, 5, 5, 3, 1, 3, 3, 1, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2] 


    CountFrequency(my_list) 



















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Output:


 1 :  5
 2 :  4
 3 :  3
 4 :  3
 5 :  2





Time Complexity:O(N), where N is the length of the list.


Alternative way:An alternative approach can be to use the dict.get() method. This makes the program much more shorter and makes understand how get method is useful instead of if…else. 











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# Python program to count the frequency of 


# elements in a list using a dictionary 


  


def CountFrequency(my_list): 


      


   # Creating an empty dictionary  


   count = {} 


   for i in [1, 1, 1, 5, 5, 3, 1, 3, 3, 1 ,4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2]: 


    count[i] = count.get(i, 0) + 1


   return count 


  


# Driver function 


if __name__ == "__main__":  


    my_list =[1, 1, 1, 5, 5, 3, 1, 3, 3, 1, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2] 


    print(CountFrequency(my_list)) 



















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Output:


{1: 5, 5: 2, 3: 3, 4: 3, 2: 4}





Related Article : 

Count frequencies of all elements in array in Python using collections module





    

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