Calculating the Moving Average of a List

Question

This weekend I decided to try my hand at some Scala and Clojure. I\'m proficient with object oriented programming, and so Scala was easy to pick up as a language, but wante

Answer 1

Here's a purely functional solution in Clojure. More complex than those already provided, but it is lazy and only adjusts the average at each step, instead of recalculating it from scratch. It's actually slower than a simple solution which calculates a new average at each step if the period is small; for larger periods, however, it experiences virtually no slowdown, whereas something doing (/ (take period ...) period) will perform worse for longer periods.

(defn moving-average
  "Calculates the moving average of values with the given period.
  Returns a lazy seq, works with infinite input sequences.
  Does not include initial zeros in the output."
  [period values]
  (let [gen (fn gen [last-sum values-old values-new]
              (if (empty? values-new)
                nil
                (let [num-out (first values-old)
                      num-in  (first values-new)
                      new-sum (+ last-sum (- num-out) num-in)]
                  (lazy-seq
                    (cons new-sum
                          (gen new-sum
                               (next values-old)
                               (next values-new)))))))]
    (if (< (count (take period values)) period)
      nil
      (map #(/ % period)
           (gen (apply + (take (dec period) values))
                (cons 0 values)
                (drop (dec period) values))))))