mean ans std dev of an array?

[Tim Chase]

> import array
> a = array.array('f', [1,2,3])
> print a.mean()
> print a.std_dev()
> 
> Is there a way to calculate the mean and standard deviation on array
> data?
> 
> Do I need to import it into a Numeric Array to do this?

No, you don't have to...though there are likely some stats 
modules floating around.  However, they're pretty simple to 
implement:

 >>> import array
 >>> import math
 >>> a = array.array('f', [1,2,3])
 >>> mean = lambda a: sum(a)/len(a)
 >>> mean(a)
2.0
 >>> a
array('f', [1.0, 2.0, 3.0])
 >>> def stdev(a):
...     m = mean(a)
...     return math.sqrt(sum((x-m) ** 2 for x in a) / len(a))
...
 >>> stdev(a)
0.81649658092772603


Pretty much a no-brainer implementation of the algorithm 
described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

-tkc