python – Finding the average of a list

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?

On Python 3.4+ you can use statistics.mean()

l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]

import statistics
statistics.mean(l)  # 20.11111111111111

On older versions of Python you can do

sum(l) / len(l)

On Python 2 you need to convert len to a float to get float division

sum(l) / float(len(l))

There is no need to use reduce. It is much slower and was removed in Python 3.

l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]
sum(l) / len(l)

You can use numpy.mean:

l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]

import numpy as np
print(np.mean(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)

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.)

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.

Instead of casting to float, you can add 0.0 to the sum:

def avg(l):
    return sum(l, 0.0) / len(l)

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 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

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:

https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/10min.html

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)

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.

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)

If you wanted to get more than just the mean (aka average) you might check out scipy stats

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)

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

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.

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

l = [15, 18, 2, 36, 12, 78, 5, 6, 9]

l = map(float,l)
print '%.2f' %(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.

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

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

I want to add just another approach

import itertools,operator
list(itertools.accumulate(l,operator.add)).pop(-1) / len(l)

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)