I have to find the average of a list in Python. This is my code so far
l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
print reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, l)
I've got it so it adds together the values in the list, but I don't know how to make it divide into them?
sum(l) / float(len(l))
is the right answer, but just for completeness you can compute an average with a single reduce:
>>> reduce(lambda x, y: x + y / float(len(l)), l, 0)
20.111111111111114
Note that this can result in a slight rounding error:
>>> sum(l) / float(len(l))
20.111111111111111
I had a similar question to solve in a Udacity´s problems. Instead of a built-in function i coded:
def list_mean(n):
summing = float(sum(n))
count = float(len(n))
if n == []:
return False
return float(summing/count)
Much more longer than usual but for a beginner its quite challenging.
suppose that
x = [
[-5.01,-5.43,1.08,0.86,-2.67,4.94,-2.51,-2.25,5.56,1.03],
[-8.12,-3.48,-5.52,-3.78,0.63,3.29,2.09,-2.13,2.86,-3.33],
[-3.68,-3.54,1.66,-4.11,7.39,2.08,-2.59,-6.94,-2.26,4.33]
]
you can notice that x
has dimension 3*10 if you need to get the mean
to each row you can type this
theMean = np.mean(x1,axis=1)
don't forget to import numpy as np
from scipy import stats
l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
print(stats.describe(l))
# DescribeResult(nobs=9, minmax=(2, 78), mean=20.11111111111111,
# variance=572.3611111111111, skewness=1.7791785448425341,
# kurtosis=1.9422716419666397)
Instead of casting to float, you can add 0.0 to the sum:
def avg(l):
return sum(l, 0.0) / len(l)
There is a statistics library if you are using python >= 3.4
https://docs.python.org/3/library/statistics.html
You may use it's mean method like this. Let's say you have a list of numbers of which you want to find mean:-
list = [11, 13, 12, 15, 17]
import statistics as s
s.mean(list)
It has other methods too like stdev, variance, mode, harmonic mean, median etc which are too useful.
I tried using the options above but didn't work. Try this:
from statistics import mean
n = [11, 13, 15, 17, 19]
print(n)
print(mean(n))
worked on python 3.5
numbers = [0,1,2,3]
numbers[0] = input("Please enter a number")
numbers[1] = input("Please enter a second number")
numbers[2] = input("Please enter a third number")
numbers[3] = input("Please enter a fourth number")
print (numbers)
print ("Finding the Avarage")
avarage = int(numbers[0]) + int(numbers[1]) + int(numbers[2]) + int(numbers [3]) / 4
print (avarage)
l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
sum(l) / len(l)
Both can give you close to similar values on an integer or at least 10 decimal values. But if you are really considering long floating values both can be different. Approach can vary on what you want to achieve.
>>> l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
>>> print reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, l) / len(l)
20
>>> sum(l)/len(l)
20
Floating values
>>> print reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, l) / float(len(l))
20.1111111111
>>> print sum(l)/float(len(l))
20.1111111111
@Andrew Clark was correct on his statement.
I want to add just another approach
import itertools,operator
list(itertools.accumulate(l,operator.add)).pop(-1) / len(l)
as a beginner, I just coded this:
L = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
total = 0
def average(numbers):
total = sum(numbers)
total = float(total)
return total / len(numbers)
print average(L)
print reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, l)/(len(l)*1.0)
or like posted previously
sum(l)/(len(l)*1.0)
The 1.0 is to make sure you get a floating point division
l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
l = map(float,l)
print '%.2f' %(sum(l)/len(l))
A statistics module has been added to python 3.4. It has a function to calculate the average called mean. An example with the list you provided would be:
from statistics import mean
l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
mean(l)
In order to use reduce
for taking a running average, you'll need to track the total but also the total number of elements seen so far. since that's not a trivial element in the list, you'll also have to pass reduce
an extra argument to fold into.
>>> l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
>>> running_average = reduce(lambda aggr, elem: (aggr[0] + elem, aggr[1]+1), l, (0.0,0))
>>> running_average[0]
(181.0, 9)
>>> running_average[0]/running_average[1]
20.111111111111111
Why would you use reduce()
for this when Python has a perfectly cromulent sum()
function?
print sum(l) / float(len(l))
(The float()
is necessary to force Python to do a floating-point division.)
You can use numpy.mean
:
l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
import numpy as np
print(np.mean(l))
In terms of efficiency and speed, these are the results that I got testing the other answers:
# test mean caculation
import timeit
import statistics
import numpy as np
from functools import reduce
import pandas as pd
LIST_RANGE = 10000000000
NUMBERS_OF_TIMES_TO_TEST = 10000
l = list(range(10))
def mean1():
return statistics.mean(l)
def mean2():
return sum(l) / len(l)
def mean3():
return np.mean(l)
def mean4():
return np.array(l).mean()
def mean5():
return reduce(lambda x, y: x + y / float(len(l)), l, 0)
def mean6():
return pd.Series(l).mean()
for func in [mean1, mean2, mean3, mean4, mean5, mean6]:
print(f"{func.__name__} took: ", timeit.timeit(stmt=func, number=NUMBERS_OF_TIMES_TO_TEST))
and the results:
mean1 took: 0.17030245899968577
mean2 took: 0.002183011999932205
mean3 took: 0.09744236000005913
mean4 took: 0.07070840100004716
mean5 took: 0.022754742999950395
mean6 took: 1.6689282460001778
so clearly the winner is:
sum(l) / len(l)
Find the average in list By using the following PYTHON code:
l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
print(sum(l)//len(l))
try this it easy.
Or use pandas
's Series.mean
method:
pd.Series(sequence).mean()
Demo:
>>> import pandas as pd
>>> l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
>>> pd.Series(l).mean()
20.11111111111111
>>>
From the docs:
Series.mean(axis=None, skipna=None, level=None, numeric_only=None, **kwargs)
¶
And here is the docs for this:
https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.Series.mean.html
And the whole documentation:
Combining a couple of the above answers, I've come up with the following which works with reduce and doesn't assume you have L
available inside the reducing function:
from operator import truediv
L = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
def sum_and_count(x, y):
try:
return (x[0] + y, x[1] + 1)
except TypeError:
return (x + y, 2)
truediv(*reduce(sum_and_count, L))
# prints
20.11111111111111
Source: Stackoverflow.com