julia - How to find the key for the min/max value of a Dict?

Question

I want to find the key corresponding to the min or max value of a dictionary in julia. In Python I would to the following:

my_dict = {1:20, 2:10}
min(my_dict, my         


        

Answer 1

You could use reduce like this, which will return the key of the first smallest value in d:

reduce((x, y) -> d[x] ≤ d[y] ? x : y, keys(d))

This only works for non-empty Dicts, though. (But the notion of the “key of the minimal value of no values” does not really make sense, so that case should usually be handled seperately anyway.)

---

Edit regarding efficiency.

Consider these definitions (none of which handle empty collections)...

m1(d) = reduce((x, y) -> d[x] ≤ d[y] ? x : y, keys(d))

m2(d) = collect(keys(d))[indmin(collect(values(d)))]

function m3(d)
  minindex(x, y) = d[x] ≤ d[y] ? x : y
  reduce(minindex, keys(d))
end

function m4(d)
  minkey, minvalue = next(d, start(d))[1]
  for (key, value) in d
    if value < minvalue
      minkey = key
      minvalue = value
    end
  end
  minkey
end

...along with this code:

function benchmark(n)
  d = Dict{Int, Int}(1 => 1)
  m1(d); m2(d); m3(d); m4(d); m5(d)

  while length(d) < n
    setindex!(d, rand(-n:n), rand(-n:n))
  end

  @time m1(d)
  @time m2(d)
  @time m3(d)
  @time m4(d)
end

Calling benchmark(10000000) will print something like this:

1.455388 seconds (30.00 M allocations: 457.748 MB, 4.30% gc time)
0.380472 seconds (6 allocations: 152.588 MB, 0.21% gc time)
0.982006 seconds (10.00 M allocations: 152.581 MB, 0.49% gc time)
0.204604 seconds

From this we can see that m2 (from user3580870's answer) is indeed faster than my original solution m1 by a factor of around 3 to 4, and also uses less memory. This is appearently due to the function call overhead, but also the fact that the λ expression in m1 is not optimized very well. We can alleviate the second problem by defining a helper function like in m3, which is better than m1, but not as good as m2.

However, m2 still allocates O(n) memory, which can be avoided: If you really need the efficiency, you should use an explicit loop like in m4, which allocates almost no memory and is also faster.