643. Maximum Average Subarray I

Given an array consisting of n integers, find the contiguous subarray of given length k that has the maximum average value. And you need to output the maximum average value.

Example 1:
Input: [1,12,-5,-6,50,3], k = 4
Output: 12.75
Explanation: Maximum average is (12-5-6+50)/4 = 51/4 = 12.75
Note:
1 <= k <= n <= 30,000.
Elements of the given array will be in the range [-10,000, 10,000].

这道题一开始直接想到了python切片操作，虽然很简答，但是超时了

然后就利用传统思路解决，加一个减一个的思想，整个list只遍历一次。

class Solution(object):
    def findMaxAverage(self, nums, k):
        """
        :type nums: List[int]
        :type k: int
        :rtype: float
        """
        max = tmp = sum(nums[0:k])
        for i in range(k,len(nums)):
            tmp = tmp + nums[i] -nums[i-k]
            if tmp > max:
                max = tmp
        return float(max)/float(k)

这个方法时间还是很长，所以看了下别人的解决方法：
Using prefix sums (where sums[i] is the sum of the first i numbers) to compute subarray sums.

def findMaxAverage(self, nums, k):
    sums = [0] + list(itertools.accumulate(nums))
    return max(map(operator.sub, sums[k:], sums[:len(sums)-k])) / k

NumPy version (requires import numpy as np):

def findMaxAverage(self, nums, k):
    sums = np.cumsum([0] + nums)
    return int(max(sums[k:] - sums[:-k])) / k

这两个答案起初不是很懂，所以先补充下相关知识：

accumulate

accumulate迭代器（Python3 中提供）返回累加之和或者两个函数（开发者可以传递给accumulate）的累计结果，accumulate的默认操作是相加，如下，首先我们引入accumulate方法，然后传递给它0-9这个序列，它就会将它们依次相加，例如第一个是0,第二个是0+1,第三个是1+2，等等；

>>> from itertools import accumulate
>>> list(accumulate(range(10)))
[0, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45]

下面我们引入operator模块，我们首先将数字1-4传递给accumulate迭代器，另外又将operator.mul传递给它，它接受这个函数用于相乘。所以每次迭代，它相乘而非是相加（1 * 1 = 1，1 * 2 = 2，2 * 3 = 6，等等）。

>>> from itertools import accumulate
>>> import operator
>>> list(accumulate(range(1,5),operator.mul))
[1, 2, 6, 24]

numpy.cumsum

>>> a = np.array([[1,2,3], [4,5,6]])
>>> a
array([[1, 2, 3],
       [4, 5, 6]])
>>> np.cumsum(a)
array([ 1,  3,  6, 10, 15, 21])
>>> np.cumsum(a, dtype=float)     # specifies type of output value(s)
array([  1.,   3.,   6.,  10.,  15.,  21.])

>>> np.cumsum(a,axis=0)      # sum over rows for each of the 3 columns
array([[1, 2, 3],
       [5, 7, 9]])
>>> np.cumsum(a,axis=1)      # sum over columns for each of the 2 rows
array([[ 1,  3,  6],
       [ 4,  9, 15]])

所以这两个方法思路是一样的,先把nums里面的数值迭代相加生成一个list。然后求得每k个数相加的最大值。