Is there a numpy builtin to reject outliers from a list

Question

Something important when dealing with outliers is that one should try to use estimators as robust as possible. The mean of a distribution will be biased by outliers but e.g. the median will be much less.

Building on eumiro's answer:

def reject_outliers(data, m = 2.):
    d = np.abs(data - np.median(data))
    mdev = np.median(d)
    s = d/mdev if mdev else 0.
    return data[s<m]

Here I have replace the mean with the more robust median and the standard deviation with the median absolute distance to the median. I then scaled the distances by their (again) median value so that m is on a reasonable relative scale.

Note that for the data[s<m] syntax to work, data must be a numpy array.

This method is almost identical to yours, just more numpyst (also working on numpy arrays only):

def reject_outliers(data, m=2):
    return data[abs(data - np.mean(data)) < m * np.std(data)]

Benjamin Bannier's answer yields a pass-through when the median of distances from the median is 0, so I found this modified version a bit more helpful for cases as given in the example below.

def reject_outliers_2(data, m=2.):
    d = np.abs(data - np.median(data))
    mdev = np.median(d)
    s = d / (mdev if mdev else 1.)
    return data[s < m]

Example:

data_points = np.array([10, 10, 10, 17, 10, 10])
print(reject_outliers(data_points))
print(reject_outliers_2(data_points))

Gives:

[[10, 10, 10, 17, 10, 10]]  # 17 is not filtered
[10, 10, 10, 10, 10]  # 17 is filtered (it's distance, 7, is greater than m)

Building on Benjamin's, using pandas.Series, and replacing MAD with IQR:

def reject_outliers(sr, iq_range=0.5):
    pcnt = (1 - iq_range) / 2
    qlow, median, qhigh = sr.dropna().quantile([pcnt, 0.50, 1-pcnt])
    iqr = qhigh - qlow
    return sr[ (sr - median).abs() <= iqr]

For instance, if you set iq_range=0.6, the percentiles of the interquartile-range would become: 0.20 <--> 0.80, so more outliers will be included.

An alternative is to make a robust estimation of the standard deviation (assuming Gaussian statistics). Looking up online calculators, I see that the 90% percentile corresponds to 1.2815σ and the 95% is 1.645σ (http://vassarstats.net/tabs.html?#z)

As a simple example:

import numpy as np

# Create some random numbers
x = np.random.normal(5, 2, 1000)

# Calculate the statistics
print("Mean= ", np.mean(x))
print("Median= ", np.median(x))
print("Max/Min=", x.max(), " ", x.min())
print("StdDev=", np.std(x))
print("90th Percentile", np.percentile(x, 90))

# Add a few large points
x[10] += 1000
x[20] += 2000
x[30] += 1500

# Recalculate the statistics
print()
print("Mean= ", np.mean(x))
print("Median= ", np.median(x))
print("Max/Min=", x.max(), " ", x.min())
print("StdDev=", np.std(x))
print("90th Percentile", np.percentile(x, 90))

# Measure the percentile intervals and then estimate Standard Deviation of the distribution, both from median to the 90th percentile and from the 10th to 90th percentile
p90 = np.percentile(x, 90)
p10 = np.percentile(x, 10)
p50 = np.median(x)
# p50 to p90 is 1.2815 sigma
rSig = (p90-p50)/1.2815
print("Robust Sigma=", rSig)

rSig = (p90-p10)/(2*1.2815)
print("Robust Sigma=", rSig)

The output I get is:

Mean=  4.99760520022
Median=  4.95395274981
Max/Min= 11.1226494654   -2.15388472011
Sigma= 1.976629928
90th Percentile 7.52065379649

Mean=  9.64760520022
Median=  4.95667658782
Max/Min= 2205.43861943   -2.15388472011
Sigma= 88.6263902244
90th Percentile 7.60646688694

Robust Sigma= 2.06772555531
Robust Sigma= 1.99878292462

Which is close to the expected value of 2.

If we want to remove points above/below 5 standard deviations (with 1000 points we would expect 1 value > 3 standard deviations):

y = x[abs(x - p50) < rSig*5]

# Print the statistics again
print("Mean= ", np.mean(y))
print("Median= ", np.median(y))
print("Max/Min=", y.max(), " ", y.min())
print("StdDev=", np.std(y))

Which gives:

Mean=  4.99755359935
Median=  4.95213030447
Max/Min= 11.1226494654   -2.15388472011
StdDev= 1.97692712883

I have no idea which approach is the more efficent/robust