Where can I find mad (mean absolute deviation) in scipy?

Question

It seems scipy once provided a function mad to calculate the mean absolute deviation for a set of numbers:

http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/browser/trunk

Answer 1

I'm using:

from math import fabs

a = [1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 6, 9]

median = sorted(a)[len(a)//2]

for b in a:
    mad = fabs(b - median)
    print b,mad

Answer 2

I'm just learning Python and Numpy, but here is the code I wrote to check my 7th grader's math homework which wanted the M(ean)AD of 2 sets of numbers:

Data in Numpy matrix rows:

import numpy as np

>>> a = np.matrix( [ [ 80, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 76, 77, 79, 84, 75, 79, 76, 78 ], \\    
... [ 66, 69, 76, 72, 79, 77, 74, 77, 71, 79, 74, 66, 67, 73 ] ], dtype=float )    
>>> matMad = np.mean( np.abs( np.tile( np.mean( a, axis=1 ), ( 1, a.shape[1] ) ) - a ), axis=1 )    
>>> matMad    
matrix([[ 1.81632653],
        [ 3.73469388]])

Data in Numpy 1D arrays:

>>> a1 = np.array( [ 80, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 76, 77, 79, 84, 75, 79, 76, 78 ], dtype=float )    
>>> a2 = np.array( [ 66, 69, 76, 72, 79, 77, 74, 77, 71, 79, 74, 66, 67, 73 ], dtype=float )    
>>> madA1 = np.mean( np.abs( np.tile( np.mean( a1 ), ( 1, len( a1 ) ) ) - a1 ) )    
>>> madA2 = np.mean( np.abs( np.tile( np.mean( a2 ), ( 1, len( a2 ) ) ) - a2 ) )    
>>> madA1, madA2    
(1.816326530612244, 3.7346938775510199)

Answer 3

For what its worth, I use this for MAD:

def mad(arr):
    """ Median Absolute Deviation: a "Robust" version of standard deviation.
        Indices variabililty of the sample.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_absolute_deviation 
    """
    arr = np.ma.array(arr).compressed() # should be faster to not use masked arrays.
    med = np.median(arr)
    return np.median(np.abs(arr - med))

Answer 4

Using numpy only:

def meanDeviation(numpyArray):
    mean = np.mean(numpyArray)
    f = lambda x: abs(x - mean)
    vf = np.vectorize(f)
    return (np.add.reduce(vf(numpyArray))) / len(numpyArray)