[Numpy-discussion] Medians that ignore values
Bruce Southey
bsouthey at gmail.com
Thu Sep 18 09:28:45 EDT 2008
Nadav Horesh wrote:
> I think you need to use masked arrays.
>
> Nadav
>
>
> -----הודעה מקורית-----
> מאת: numpy-discussion-bounces at scipy.org בשם Peter Saffrey
> נשלח: ה 18-ספטמבר-08 14:27
> אל: numpy-discussion at scipy.org
> נושא: [Numpy-discussion] Medians that ignore values
>
> I have data from biological experiments that is represented as a list of
> about 5000 triples. I would like to convert this to a list of the median
> of each triple. I did some profiling and found that numpy was much about
> 12 times faster for this application than using regular Python lists and
> a list median implementation. I'll be performing quite a few
> mathematical operations on these values, so using numpy arrays seems
> sensible.
>
> The only problem is that my data has gaps in it - where an experiment
> failed, a "triple" will not have three values. Some will have 2, 1 or
> even no values. To keep the arrays regular so that they can be used by
> numpy, is there some dummy value I can use to fill these gaps that will
> be ignored by the median routine?
>
> I tried NaN for this, but as far as median is concerned, it counts as
> infinity:
>
> >>> from numpy import *
> >>> median(array([1,3,nan]))
> 3.0
> >>> median(array([1,nan,nan]))
> nan
>
> Is this the correct behavior for median with nan? Is there a fix for
> this or am I going to have to settle with using lists?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Peter
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Hi,
The counting of infinity is correct due to the implementation of IEEE
Standard for Binary Floating-Point for Arithmetic (IEEE 754).
You might want to try isfinite() to first remove nan, +/- infinity
before doing that.
numpy.median(a[numpy.isfinite(a)])
Bruce
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