Compute the arithmetic mean along the specified axis.
Returns the average of the array elements. The average is taken
over the flattened array by default, otherwise over the specified
axis. float64 intermediate and return values are used
for integer inputs.
Parameters :
a : array_like
Array containing numbers whose mean is desired. If a is not an array, a conversion is
attempted.
axis : int, optional
Axis along which the means are computed. The default is to
compute the mean of the flattened array.
dtype : data-type, optional
Type to use in computing the mean. For integer inputs, the
default is float64; for floating point inputs, it is the
same as the input dtype.
out : ndarray, optional
Alternate output array in which to place the result. The default
is None; if provided, it must have the same shape as
the expected output, but the type will be cast if necessary. See
doc.ufuncs for details.
skipna : bool, optional
If this is set to True, skips any NA values during calculation
instead of propagating them.
keepdims : bool, optional
If this is set to True, the axes which are reduced are left in
the result as dimensions with size one. With this option, the
result will broadcast correctly against the original arr.
Returns :
m : ndarray, see dtype parameter
above
If out=None, returns a new array
containing the mean values, otherwise a reference to the output
array is returned.
See also
Weighted average
Notes
The arithmetic mean is the sum of the elements along the axis
divided by the number of elements.
Note that for floating-point input, the mean is computed using
the same precision the input has. Depending on the input data, this
can cause the results to be inaccurate, especially for float32 (see example below). Specifying a
higher-precision accumulator using the dtype keyword can alleviate this issue.
Examples
>>>a = np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4]])
>>>np.mean(a)
2.5
>>>np.mean(a, axis=0)
array([ 2., 3.])
>>>np.mean(a, axis=1)
array([ 1.5, 3.5])
In single precision, mean can be inaccurate:
>>>a = np.zeros((2, 512*512), dtype=np.float32)
>>>a[0, :] = 1.0
>>>a[1, :] = 0.1
>>>np.mean(a)
0.546875
Computing the mean in float64 is more accurate:
>>>np.mean(a, dtype=np.float64)
0.55000000074505806