Where can I find mad (mean absolute deviation) in scipy?

Ton van den Heuvel picture Ton van den Heuvel · Jan 19, 2012 · Viewed 47.5k times · Source

It seems scipy once provided a function mad to calculate the mean absolute deviation for a set of numbers:

http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/browser/trunk/scipy/stats/models/utils.py?rev=3473

However, I can not find it anywhere in current versions of scipy. Of course it is possible to just copy the old code from repository but I prefer to use scipy's version. Where can I find it, or has it been replaced or removed?

Answer

mhsmith picture mhsmith · Oct 20, 2013

[EDIT] Since this keeps on getting downvoted: I know that median absolute deviation is a more commonly-used statistic, but the questioner asked for mean absolute deviation, and here's how to do it:

from numpy import mean, absolute

def mad(data, axis=None):
    return mean(absolute(data - mean(data, axis)), axis)