Find the most common element in a list

Borrowing from here, this can be used with Python 2.7:

from collections import Counter

def Most_Common(lst):
    data = Counter(lst)
    return data.most_common(1)[0][0]

Works around 4-6 times faster than Alex's solutions, and is 50 times faster than the one-liner proposed by newacct.

To retrieve the element that occurs first in the list in case of ties:

def most_common(lst):
    data = Counter(lst)
    return max(lst, key=data.get)

A simpler one-liner:

def most_common(lst):
    return max(set(lst), key=lst.count)