Is there a numpy builtin to reject outliers from a list

Question

Is there a numpy builtin to do something like the following? That is, take a list d and return a list filtered_d with any outlying elements removed

Answer 1

An alternative is to make a robust estimation of the standard deviation (assuming Gaussian statistics). Looking up online calculators, I see that the 90% percentile corresponds to 1.2815σ and the 95% is 1.645σ (http://vassarstats.net/tabs.html?#z)

As a simple example:

import numpy as np

# Create some random numbers
x = np.random.normal(5, 2, 1000)

# Calculate the statistics
print("Mean= ", np.mean(x))
print("Median= ", np.median(x))
print("Max/Min=", x.max(), " ", x.min())
print("StdDev=", np.std(x))
print("90th Percentile", np.percentile(x, 90))

# Add a few large points
x[10] += 1000
x[20] += 2000
x[30] += 1500

# Recalculate the statistics
print()
print("Mean= ", np.mean(x))
print("Median= ", np.median(x))
print("Max/Min=", x.max(), " ", x.min())
print("StdDev=", np.std(x))
print("90th Percentile", np.percentile(x, 90))

# Measure the percentile intervals and then estimate Standard Deviation of the distribution, both from median to the 90th percentile and from the 10th to 90th percentile
p90 = np.percentile(x, 90)
p10 = np.percentile(x, 10)
p50 = np.median(x)
# p50 to p90 is 1.2815 sigma
rSig = (p90-p50)/1.2815
print("Robust Sigma=", rSig)

rSig = (p90-p10)/(2*1.2815)
print("Robust Sigma=", rSig)

The output I get is:

Mean=  4.99760520022
Median=  4.95395274981
Max/Min= 11.1226494654   -2.15388472011
Sigma= 1.976629928
90th Percentile 7.52065379649

Mean=  9.64760520022
Median=  4.95667658782
Max/Min= 2205.43861943   -2.15388472011
Sigma= 88.6263902244
90th Percentile 7.60646688694

Robust Sigma= 2.06772555531
Robust Sigma= 1.99878292462

Which is close to the expected value of 2.

If we want to remove points above/below 5 standard deviations (with 1000 points we would expect 1 value > 3 standard deviations):

y = x[abs(x - p50) < rSig*5]

# Print the statistics again
print("Mean= ", np.mean(y))
print("Median= ", np.median(y))
print("Max/Min=", y.max(), " ", y.min())
print("StdDev=", np.std(y))

Which gives:

Mean=  4.99755359935
Median=  4.95213030447
Max/Min= 11.1226494654   -2.15388472011
StdDev= 1.97692712883

I have no idea which approach is the more efficent/robust