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

If you do choose to roll your own, rather than use an existing library, please be conscious of floating point error and try to minimize its effects:

class SumAccumulator:
    def __init__(self):
        self.values = [0]
        self.count = 0

    def add( self, val ):
        self.values.append( val )
        self.count = self.count + 1
        i = self.count
        while i & 0x01:
            i = i >> 1
            v0 = self.values.pop()
            v1 = self.values.pop()
            self.values.append( v0 + v1 )

    def get_total(self):
        return sum( reversed(self.values) )

    def get_size( self ):
        return self.count

If all your values are roughly the same order of magnitude, then this will help to preserve precision by always adding values of roughly similar magnitudes.