topic: Descriptive statistics in Python

Python comes equipped with built-in capabilities that are useful for calculating various measures of central tendency.

To explore this yourself, open a Python shell or a Jupyter Notebook.

Start by importing the statistics library to access its features.

import statistics

Next, create a list of numbers.

data = [8, 15, 13, 20, 17, 15, 21, 23, 18, 20]

You can now calculate the mean, median and mode of the data:

mean_value = statistics.mean(data)
print(f"Mean: {mean_value}")

median_value = statistics.median(data)
print(f"Median: {median_value}")

try:
    mode_value = statistics.mode(data)
    print(f"Mode: {mode_value}")
except statistics.StatisticsError:
    print("Mode: No unique mode in the dataset.")

Experiment with this a bit:

  • If you alter the numbers in data then does mean_value change? Or do you need to take additional steps to recalculate it?
  • Can you determine if your dataset is skewed or not? What clues indicate skewness?
  • Does your data have a mode? Try to create a dataset that has a mode and another that doesn’t. How do you identify if a mode exists?
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