Write a method named mode
that accepts a List
of strings as a parameter and returns an integer representing the number of occurrences of the most frequently occurring element of the list (also called the "mode" of the list). If the list is empty, return 0. If all elements in the list are unique, return 1. For example, if your method were passed the list [A, ZZ, B, B, G, A, B, B, XY, K, F, B, C, A, D]
, you would return 5 because there are 5 occurrences of "B"
, the most frequently occurring element. You should use an auxiliary collection from the Guava framework to help you.
Your code should run in O(N) time where N is the number of elements in the list. You may assume that neither the list nor any of its elements are null
. Do not modify the list in any way.