Standard deviation of a list

Question

I want to find mean and standard deviation of 1st, 2nd,... digits of several (Z) lists. For example, I have

A_rank=[0.8,0.4,1.2,3.7,2.6,5.8]
B_rank=[0.1,2.8,         


        

Answer 1

pure python code:

from math import sqrt

def stddev(lst):
    mean = float(sum(lst)) / len(lst)
    return sqrt(float(reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, map(lambda x: (x - mean) ** 2, lst))) / len(lst))

Answer 2

Here's some pure-Python code you can use to calculate the mean and standard deviation.

All code below is based on the statistics module in Python 3.4+.

def mean(data):
    """Return the sample arithmetic mean of data."""
    n = len(data)
    if n < 1:
        raise ValueError('mean requires at least one data point')
    return sum(data)/n # in Python 2 use sum(data)/float(n)

def _ss(data):
    """Return sum of square deviations of sequence data."""
    c = mean(data)
    ss = sum((x-c)**2 for x in data)
    return ss

def stddev(data, ddof=0):
    """Calculates the population standard deviation
    by default; specify ddof=1 to compute the sample
    standard deviation."""
    n = len(data)
    if n < 2:
        raise ValueError('variance requires at least two data points')
    ss = _ss(data)
    pvar = ss/(n-ddof)
    return pvar**0.5

Note: for improved accuracy when summing floats, the statistics module uses a custom function _sum rather than the built-in sum which I've used in its place.

Now we have for example:

>>> mean([1, 2, 3])
2.0
>>> stddev([1, 2, 3]) # population standard deviation
0.816496580927726
>>> stddev([1, 2, 3], ddof=1) # sample standard deviation
0.1