How should I practice Employee Count Median, Mean and Mode?

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Employee Count Median, Mean and Mode

Clay● EasyINTERNPHONE SCREEN

Problem statement

Source note: This comes from a Clay intern video interview, in a coding round where AI tools were not allowed. The candidate had to pull a plain-text data file from a remote location and summarize one numeric field, each company's number of employees, with its middle value, its arithmetic average and its most frequent value. Questions about Python itself came afterwards.

The report did not give the file's format, how to treat an even number of values or a tie for the mode, or any limits, and it did not describe the language questions. Practice choices here: the file is already downloaded and passed in as its lines, each line is one company's employee count, the even-count median is the average of the two middle values, a tie for the mode goes to the smallest value, and the size limits are ours. The download itself and the language questions are not part of the judged task.

The judged task matches the report at about 65%.

You downloaded a remote text file in which each line is one company's employee count. The file's lines are given as the string array lines.

Return [median, mean, mode] of the employee counts:

median: sort the counts by value. With an odd number of counts it is the middle one; with an even number it is the average of the two middle ones.
mean: the sum of the counts divided by how many there are.
mode: the count that appears most often. If several counts tie, return the smallest of them.

Each value within 10^-9 of the expected one (relative for values above 1) is accepted.

Function

employeeCountStats(lines: String[]) → double[]

Examples

Example 1

lines = ["120","45","300","45","80"]return = [80.0,118.0,45.0]

Sorted, the counts are 45, 45, 80, 120, 300. The median is the middle value 80, the mean is 590 / 5 = 118, and 45 appears twice, more than any other count. Sorting the lines as text instead would give "120", "300", "45", "45", "80" and a wrong middle value of 45.

Example 2

lines = ["10","400","25","400","10","7"]return = [17.5,142.0,10.0]

Sorted: 7, 10, 10, 25, 400, 400. With an even count the median is the average of the two middle values, (10 + 25) / 2 = 17.5. The mean is 852 / 6 = 142. 10 and 400 both appear twice, so the mode is the smaller one, 10.

Example 3

lines = ["9","1000","250"]return = [250.0,419.6666666666667,9.0]

Every count appears once, so the mode is the smallest count, 9. Sorted, the counts are 9, 250, 1000, so the median is 250. The mean is 1259 / 3 = 419.666....

Constraints

1 <= lines.length <= 2000
Each line is a decimal integer from 0 to 10^7 with no sign, spaces or leading zeros.