Finding median of list in Python

Question

How do you find the median of a list in Python? The list can be of any size and the numbers are not guaranteed to be in any particular order.

If the list contains an even number of elements, the function should return the average of the middle two.

Here are some examples (sorted for display purposes):

median([1]) == 1
median([1, 1]) == 1
median([1, 1, 2, 4]) == 1.5
median([0, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 9]) == 6
median([0, 0, 0, 0, 4, 4, 6, 8]) == 2

Answer 1

You can try the quickselect algorithm if faster average-case running times are needed. Quickselect has average (and best) case performance O(n), although it can end up O(n²) on a bad day.

Here's an implementation with a randomly chosen pivot:

import random

def select_nth(n, items):
    pivot = random.choice(items)

    lesser = [item for item in items if item < pivot]
    if len(lesser) > n:
        return select_nth(n, lesser)
    n -= len(lesser)

    numequal = items.count(pivot)
    if numequal > n:
        return pivot
    n -= numequal

    greater = [item for item in items if item > pivot]
    return select_nth(n, greater)

You can trivially turn this into a method to find medians:

def median(items):
    if len(items) % 2:
        return select_nth(len(items)//2, items)

    else:
        left  = select_nth((len(items)-1) // 2, items)
        right = select_nth((len(items)+1) // 2, items)

        return (left + right) / 2

This is very unoptimised, but it's not likely that even an optimised version will outperform Tim Sort (CPython's built-in sort) because that's really fast. I've tried before and I lost.

Answer 2

(Works with python-2.x):

def median(lst):
    n = len(lst)
    s = sorted(lst)
    return (s[n//2-1]/2.0+s[n//2]/2.0, s[n//2])[n % 2] if n else None

---

>>> median([-5, -5, -3, -4, 0, -1])
-3.5

---

numpy.median():

>>> from numpy import median
>>> median([1, -4, -1, -1, 1, -3])
-1.0

---

For python-3.x, use statistics.median:

>>> from statistics import median
>>> median([5, 2, 3, 8, 9, -2])
4.0

Answer 3

The sorted() function is very helpful for this. Use the sorted function to order the list, then simply return the middle value (or average the two middle values if the list contains an even amount of elements).

def median(lst):
    sortedLst = sorted(lst)
    lstLen = len(lst)
    index = (lstLen - 1) // 2
   
    if (lstLen % 2):
        return sortedLst[index]
    else:
        return (sortedLst[index] + sortedLst[index + 1])/2.0

Answer 4

Of course you can use build in functions, but if you would like to create your own you can do something like this. The trick here is to use ~ operator that flip positive number to negative. For instance ~2 -> -3 and using negative in for list in Python will count items from the end. So if you have mid == 2 then it will take third element from beginning and third item from the end.

def median(data):
    data.sort()
    mid = len(data) // 2
    return (data[mid] + data[~mid]) / 2

Answer 5

Here's a cleaner solution:

def median(lst):
    quotient, remainder = divmod(len(lst), 2)
    if remainder:
        return sorted(lst)[quotient]
    return sum(sorted(lst)[quotient - 1:quotient + 1]) / 2.

Note: Answer changed to incorporate suggestion in comments.

Answer 6

You can use the list.sort to avoid creating new lists with sorted and sort the lists in place.

Also you should not use list as a variable name as it shadows python's own list.

def median(l):
    half = len(l) // 2
    l.sort()
    if not len(l) % 2:
        return (l[half - 1] + l[half]) / 2.0
    return l[half]

Answer 7

def median(x):
    x = sorted(x)
    listlength = len(x) 
    num = listlength//2
    if listlength%2==0:
        middlenum = (x[num]+x[num-1])/2
    else:
        middlenum = x[num]
    return middlenum

Answer 8

def median(array):
    """Calculate median of the given list.
    """
    # TODO: use statistics.median in Python 3
    array = sorted(array)
    half, odd = divmod(len(array), 2)
    if odd:
        return array[half]
    return (array[half - 1] + array[half]) / 2.0

Answer 9

A simple function to return the median of the given list:

def median(lst):
    lst = sorted(lst)  # Sort the list first
    if len(lst) % 2 == 0:  # Checking if the length is even
        # Applying formula which is sum of middle two divided by 2
        return (lst[len(lst) // 2] + lst[(len(lst) - 1) // 2]) / 2
    else:
        # If length is odd then get middle value
        return lst[len(lst) // 2]

Some examples with the median function:

>>> median([9, 12, 20, 21, 34, 80])  # Even
20.5
>>> median([9, 12, 80, 21, 34])  # Odd
21

If you want to use library you can just simply do:

>>> import statistics
>>> statistics.median([9, 12, 20, 21, 34, 80])  # Even
20.5
>>> statistics.median([9, 12, 80, 21, 34])  # Odd
21

Answer 10

I posted my solution at Python implementation of "median of medians" algorithm , which is a little bit faster than using sort(). My solution uses 15 numbers per column, for a speed ~5N which is faster than the speed ~10N of using 5 numbers per column. The optimal speed is ~4N, but I could be wrong about it.

Per Tom's request in his comment, I added my code here, for reference. I believe the critical part for speed is using 15 numbers per column, instead of 5.

#!/bin/pypy
#
# TH @stackoverflow, 2016-01-20, linear time "median of medians" algorithm
#
import sys, random


items_per_column = 15


def find_i_th_smallest( A, i ):
    t = len(A)
    if(t <= items_per_column):
        # if A is a small list with less than items_per_column items, then:
        #
        # 1. do sort on A
        # 2. find i-th smallest item of A
        #
        return sorted(A)[i]
    else:
        # 1. partition A into columns of k items each. k is odd, say 5.
        # 2. find the median of every column
        # 3. put all medians in a new list, say, B
        #
        B = [ find_i_th_smallest(k, (len(k) - 1)/2) for k in [A[j:(j + items_per_column)] for j in range(0,len(A),items_per_column)]]

        # 4. find M, the median of B
        #
        M = find_i_th_smallest(B, (len(B) - 1)/2)


        # 5. split A into 3 parts by M, { < M }, { == M }, and { > M }
        # 6. find which above set has A's i-th smallest, recursively.
        #
        P1 = [ j for j in A if j < M ]
        if(i < len(P1)):
            return find_i_th_smallest( P1, i)
        P3 = [ j for j in A if j > M ]
        L3 = len(P3)
        if(i < (t - L3)):
            return M
        return find_i_th_smallest( P3, i - (t - L3))


# How many numbers should be randomly generated for testing?
#
number_of_numbers = int(sys.argv[1])


# create a list of random positive integers
#
L = [ random.randint(0, number_of_numbers) for i in range(0, number_of_numbers) ]


# Show the original list
#
# print L


# This is for validation
#
# print sorted(L)[int((len(L) - 1)/2)]


# This is the result of the "median of medians" function.
# Its result should be the same as the above.
#
print find_i_th_smallest( L, (len(L) - 1) / 2)

Answer 11

In case you need additional information on the distribution of your list, the percentile method will probably be useful. And a median value corresponds to the 50th percentile of a list:

import numpy as np
a = np.array([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9])
median_value = np.percentile(a, 50) # return 50th percentile
print median_value 

Answer 12

Here what I came up with during this exercise in Codecademy:

def median(data):
    new_list = sorted(data)
    if len(new_list)%2 > 0:
        return new_list[len(new_list)/2]
    elif len(new_list)%2 == 0:
        return (new_list[(len(new_list)/2)] + new_list[(len(new_list)/2)-1]) /2.0

print median([1,2,3,4,5,9])

Answer 13

Just two lines are enough.

def get_median(arr):
    '''
    Calculate the median of a sequence.
    :param arr: list
    :return: int or float
    '''
    arr = sorted(arr)
    return arr[len(arr)//2] if len(arr) % 2 else (arr[len(arr)//2] + arr[len(arr)//2-1])/2

Answer 14

median Function

def median(midlist):
    midlist.sort()
    lens = len(midlist)
    if lens % 2 != 0: 
        midl = (lens / 2)
        res = midlist[midl]
    else:
        odd = (lens / 2) -1
        ev = (lens / 2) 
        res = float(midlist[odd] + midlist[ev]) / float(2)
    return res

Answer 15

I had some problems with lists of float values. I ended up using a code snippet from the python3 statistics.median and is working perfect with float values without imports. source

def calculateMedian(list):
    data = sorted(list)
    n = len(data)
    if n == 0:
        return None
    if n % 2 == 1:
        return data[n // 2]
    else:
        i = n // 2
        return (data[i - 1] + data[i]) / 2

Answer 16

def midme(list1):

    list1.sort()
    if len(list1)%2>0:
            x = list1[int((len(list1)/2))]
    else:
            x = ((list1[int((len(list1)/2))-1])+(list1[int(((len(list1)/2)))]))/2
    return x


midme([4,5,1,7,2])

Answer 17

def median(array):
    if len(array) < 1:
        return(None)
    if len(array) % 2 == 0:
        median = (array[len(array)//2-1: len(array)//2+1])
        return sum(median) / len(median)
    else:
        return(array[len(array)//2])