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Often you may be interested in calculating the mean of one or more columns in a pandas DataFrame. Fortunately you can do this easily in pandas using the function.

This tutorial shows several examples of how to use this function.

Example 1: Find the Mean of a Single Column

Suppose we have the following pandas DataFrame:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

#create DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame({'player': ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J'],
                   'points': [25, 20, 14, 16, 27, 20, 12, 15, 14, 19],
                   'assists': [5, 7, 7, 8, 5, 7, 6, 9, 9, 5],
                   'rebounds': [np.nan, 8, 10, 6, 6, 9, 6, 10, 10, 7]})

#view DataFrame 
df

        player	points	assists	rebounds
0	A	25	5	NaN
1	B	20	7	8.0
2	C	14	7	10.0
3	D	16	8	6.0
4	E	27	5	6.0
5	F	20	7	9.0
6	G	12	6	6.0
7	H	15	9	10.0
8	I	14	9	10.0
9	J	19	5	7.0

We can find the mean of the column titled “points” by using the following syntax:

df['points'].mean()

18.2

The mean() function will also exclude NA’s by default. For example, if we find the mean of the “rebounds” column, the first value of “NaN” will simply be excluded from the calculation:

df['rebounds'].mean()

8.0

If you attempt to find the mean of a column that is not numeric, you will receive an error:

df['player'].mean()
TypeError: Could not convert ABCDEFGHIJ to numeric

Example 2: Find the Mean of Multiple Columns

We can find the mean of multiple columns by using the following syntax:

#find mean of points and rebounds columns
df[['rebounds', 'points']].mean()

rebounds     8.0
points      18.2
dtype: float64

Example 3: Find the Mean of All Columns

We can find also find the mean of all numeric columns by using the following syntax:

#find mean of all numeric columns in DataFrame
df.mean()

points      18.2
assists      6.8
rebounds     8.0
dtype: float64

Additional Resources