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Solution Review: Average of a List

Explore how to write a Python function that calculates the average of a list of numbers. Understand key concepts like looping through list elements, summing values, and dividing by the list length. This lesson helps you build essential programming techniques foundational to data science tasks.

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Solution

Python 3.5
# function to compute average of a list
def average(input_list):
    # sum calculation
    sum_list = 0
    for i in input_list:
        sum_list = sum_list + i 
    # average calculation
    avg = sum_list /len(input_list)
    return avg
sample_list = [2,4,5,1]
avg_list = average(sample_list)
print(avg_list)

We define the average function in lines 2-8. Let’s break this function down. For computing the average of the list, we need to find the sum of the numbers in the list and the length of the list. We already know we can use the len function to compute ...