Find the Mean/Average of a Number List in Python
To my knowledge, there is no built-in function in Python to find the mean of a list of numbers. You can use statistics packages to do this, such as statpy, but if you just want a lightweight solution to do the trick you can use the function below. Note that on the first line I am converting the numbers to floats because if you were to pass it a list of integers, it would not compute the mean properly.
def mean(numberList): floatNums = [float(x) for x in numberList] return sum(floatNums) / len(numberList)
May 1st, 2009 at 7:34 am
couldnt you just do
def mean(numberList):
return float(sum(floatNums)) / len(numberList)
February 4th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
pk is right, python has a built in sum() function, although his code example is sloppy.
def mean(nums):
if len(nums):
return float( sum(nums) / len(nums))
else:
return 0.0
February 5th, 2010 at 10:10 am
hah, division by zero. how embarrasing.