python: calculate center of mass

Question

I have a data set with 4 columns: x,y,z, and value, let's say:

x  y  z  value
0  0  0  0
0  1  0  0
0  2  0  0
1  0  0  0
1  1  0  1
1  2  0  1
2  0  0  0
2  1  0  0
2  2  0  0

I would like to calculate the center of mass CM = (x_m,y_m,z_m) of all values. In the present example, I would like to see (1,1.5,0) as output.

I thought this must be a trivial problem, but I can't find a solution to it in the internet. scipy.ndimage.measurements.center_of_mass seems to be the right thing, but unfortunately, the function always returns two values (instead of 3). In addition, I can't find any documentation on how to set up an ndimage from an array: Would I use a numpy array N of shape (9,4)? Would then N[:,0] be the x-coordinate?

Any help is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

The simplest way I can think of is this: just find an average of the coordinates of mass components weighted by each component's contribution.

import numpy
masses = numpy.array([[0,  0,  0,  0],
[0,  1,  0,  0],
[0,  2,  0,  0],
[1,  0,  0,  0],
[1,  1,  0,  1],
[1,  2,  0,  1],
[2,  0,  0,  0],
[2,  1,  0,  0],
[2,  2,  0,  0]])

nonZeroMasses = masses[numpy.nonzero(masses[:,3])] # Not really necessary, can just use masses because 0 mass used as weight will work just fine.

CM = numpy.average(nonZeroMasses[:,:3], axis=0, weights=nonZeroMasses[:,3])