Re: NDArray for median ??

[Paul Kienzle]

On Mar 26, 2004, at 9:02 PM, Dmitri A. Sergatskov wrote:

> David Bateman wrote:
> > Ok, in trying to also convert "median" to use NDArrays, I've come back
> > to the problem of converting "sort" first, as median uses the "sort"
> ...
>
> This is somewhat off-topic. Technically one does not need to do a full
> sort to get a median. I am just wondering how straightforward
> would it be to modify 'sort' to just pickup the N-th element?
> E.g. there is "select()" algorithm in the "Numerical Recipes"
> which was faster than glibc's qsort() when I tried it.

Be aware that the usual statistical definition of median
averages the two middle values if there are an even number
of elements.  Will it still be faster than sort if you are
selecting the two middle values?

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden