Treatment of NANs in the statistics module
Steven D'Aprano
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Fri Mar 16 19:16:48 EDT 2018
The bug tracker currently has a discussion of a bug in the median(),
median_low() and median_high() functions that they wrongly compute the
medians in the face of NANs in the data:
https://bugs.python.org/issue33084
I would like to ask people how they would prefer to handle this issue:
(1) Put the responsibility on the caller to strip NANs from their data.
If there is a NAN in your data, the result of calling median() is
implementation-defined. This is the current behaviour, and is likely to
be the fastest.
(2) Return a NAN.
(3) Raise an exception.
(4) median() should strip out NANs.
(5) All of the above, selected by the caller. (In which case, which would
you prefer as the default?)
Thank you.
--
Steve
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