Get the most occuring number amongst several integers without using arrays - frequency

Question

DISCLAIMER: Rather theoretical question here, not looking for a correct answere, just asking for some inspiration!
Consider this:
A function is called repetitively and returns integers based on seeds (the same seed returns the same integer). Your task is to find out which integer is returned most often. Easy enough, right?
But: You are not allowed to use arrays or fields to store return values of said function!
Example:
int mostFrequentNumber = 0;
int occurencesOfMostFrequentNumber = 0;
int iterations = 10000000;
for(int i = 0; i < iterations; i++)
{
int result = getNumberFromSeed(i);
int occurencesOfResult = magic();
if(occurencesOfResult > occurencesOfMostFrequentNumber)
{
mostFrequentNumber = result;
occurencesOfMostFrequentNumber = occurencesOfResult;
}
}
If getNumberFromSeed() returns 2,1,5,18,5,6 and 5 then mostFrequentNumber should be 5 and occurencesOfMostFrequentNumber should be 3 because 5 is returned 3 times.
I know this could easily be solved using a two-dimentional list to store results and occurences. But imagine for a minute that you can not use any kind of arrays, lists, dictionaries etc. (Maybe because the system that is running the code has such a limited memory, that you cannot store enough integers at once or because your prehistoric programming language has no concept of collections).
How would you find mostFrequentNumber and occurencesOfMostFrequentNumber? What does magic() do?? (Of cause you do not have to stick to the example code. Any ideas are welcome!)
EDIT: I should add that the integers returned by getNumber() should be calculated using a seed, so the same seed returns the same integer (i.e. int result = getNumber(5); this would always assign the same value to result)

Answer 1

Make an hypothesis: Assume that the distribution of integers is, e.g., Normal.
Start simple. Have two variables
. N the number of elements read so far
. M1 the average of said elements.
Initialize both variables to 0.
Every time you read a new value x update N to be N + 1 and M1 to be M1 + (x - M1)/N.
At the end M1 will equal the average of all values. If the distribution was Normal this value will have a high frequency.
Now improve the above. Add a third variable:
M2 the average of all (x - M1)^2 for all values of xread so far.
Initialize M2 to 0. Now get a small memory of say 10 elements or so. For every new value x that you read update N and M1 as above and M2 as:
M2 := M2 + (x - M1)^2 * (N - 1) / N
At every step M2 is the variance of the distribution and sqrt(M2) its standard deviation.
As you proceed remember the frequencies of only the values read so far whose distances to M1 are less than sqrt(M2). This requires the use of some additional array, however, the array will be very short compared to the high number of iterations you will run. This modification will allow you to guess better the most frequent value instead of simply answering the mean (or average) as above.
UPDATE
Given that this is about insights for inspiration there is plenty of room for considering and adapting the approach I've proposed to any particular situation. Here are some thoughts
When I say assume that the distribution is Normal you should think of it as: Given that the problem has no solution, let's see if there is some qualitative information I can use to decide what kind of distribution would the data have. Given that the algorithm is intended to find the most frequent number, it should be fine to assume that the distribution is not uniform. Let's try with Normal, LogNormal, etc. to see what can be found out (more on this below.)
If the game completely disallows the use of any array, then fine, keep track of only, say 10 numbers. This would allow you to count the occurrences of the 10 best candidates, which will give more confidence to your answer. In doing this choose your candidates around the theoretical most likely value according to the distribution of your hypothesis.
You cannot use arrays but perhaps you can read the sequence of numbers two or three times, not just once. In that case you can read it once to check whether you hypothesis about its distribution is good nor bad. For instance, if you compute not just the variance but the skewness and the kurtosis you will have more elements to check your hypothesis. For instance, if the first reading indicates that there is some bias, you could use a LogNormal distribution instead, etc.
Finally, in addition to providing the approximate answer you would be able to use the information collected during the reading to estimate an interval of confidence around your answer.

Answer 2

Alright, I found a decent solution myself:
int mostFrequentNumber = 0;
int occurencesOfMostFrequentNumber = 0;
int iterations = 10000000;
int maxNumber = -2147483647;
int minNumber = 2147483647;
//Step 1: Find the largest and smallest number that _can_ occur
for(int i = 0; i < iterations; i++)
{
int result = getNumberFromSeed(i);
if(result > maxNumber)
{
maxNumber = result;
}
if(result < minNumber)
{
minNumber = result;
}
}
//Step 2: for each possible number between minNumber and maxNumber, count occurences
for(int thisNumber = minNumber; thisNumber <= maxNumber; thisNumber++)
{
int occurenceOfThisNumber = 0;
for(int i = 0; i < iterations; i++)
{
int result = getNumberFromSeed(i);
if(result == thisNumber)
{
occurenceOfThisNumber++;
}
}
if(occurenceOfThisNumber > occurencesOfMostFrequentNumber)
{
occurencesOfMostFrequentNumber = occurenceOfThisNumber;
mostFrequentNumber = thisNumber;
}
}
I must admit, this may take a long time, depending on the smallest and largest possible. But it will work without using arrays.