median Function of statistics Module in Python (Example)

In this article, I’ll illustrate how to apply the statistics.median function in Python programming.

Table of contents:

Let’s do this…

Example Data

The first step is to create some example data:

my_list = [4, 3, 8, 2, 7, 3, 8, 4, 7, 1, 5]    # Create example list
print(my_list)                                 # Print example list
# [4, 3, 8, 2, 7, 3, 8, 4, 7, 1, 5]

The previous output of the Python console visualizes the structure of our example data – We have created a list object containing 11 integer values.

Example: Get Median Using median() Function of statistics Module

In this example, I’ll show how to get the median of a list using the median function of the statistics module.

We first have to load the statistics module:

import statistics                              # Import statistics

Next, we can apply the statistics.median function to return the median of our list:

print(statistics.median(my_list))              # Apply median() function
# 4

As you can see, the median of our list is equal to 4.

Note that we have calculated the middle value of a data set using the standard median function of the statistics module.

However, the statistics module also provides alternative mode functions such as median_low() to get the low median, median_high() to find the high median, and median_grouped() to compute the 50th percentile of grouped data. More info can be found here.

Video & Further Resources

Have a look at the following video on my YouTube channel. In the video, I show how to get the middle value of data using the Python codes of this tutorial:

In addition, you might read the related tutorials on statisticsglobe.com. You can find some tutorials below:

• Calculate Median in Python
• Calculate Median by Group in Python
• Median of Array with np.median Function of NumPy Library
• mean() Function of statistics Module
• Mode of NumPy Array in Python
• Python Programming Overview

This tutorial has shown how to apply the statistics.median function to calculate the median of a list in Python programming. If you have any additional comments and/or questions, please let me know in the comments section.