Moving average or running mean

Question

Is there a SciPy function or NumPy function or module for Python that calculates the running mean of a 1D array given a specific window?

Answer 1

This question is now even older than when NeXuS wrote about it last month, BUT I like how his code deals with edge cases. However, because it is a "simple moving average," its results lag behind the data they apply to. I thought that dealing with edge cases in a more satisfying way than NumPy's modes valid, same, and full could be achieved by applying a similar approach to a convolution() based method.

My contribution uses a central running average to align its results with their data. When there are too few points available for the full-sized window to be used, running averages are computed from successively smaller windows at the edges of the array. [Actually, from successively larger windows, but that's an implementation detail.]

import numpy as np

def running_mean(l, N):
    # Also works for the(strictly invalid) cases when N is even.
    if (N//2)*2 == N:
        N = N - 1
    front = np.zeros(N//2)
    back = np.zeros(N//2)

    for i in range(1, (N//2)*2, 2):
        front[i//2] = np.convolve(l[:i], np.ones((i,))/i, mode = 'valid')
    for i in range(1, (N//2)*2, 2):
        back[i//2] = np.convolve(l[-i:], np.ones((i,))/i, mode = 'valid')
    return np.concatenate([front, np.convolve(l, np.ones((N,))/N, mode = 'valid'), back[::-1]])

It's relatively slow because it uses convolve(), and could likely be spruced up quite a lot by a true Pythonista, however, I believe that the idea stands.