Sven Schreiber wrote:
>> (Zar, Jerrold H. 1984. Biostatistical Analysis. Prentice Hall.)
> 
> Is that the seminal work on the topic ;-)

Of course not, just a reference I have handy -- though I suppose there 
are any number of them on the web too.

>> Of course, the median of an odd number of integers would be an integer.

> that's why I asked about _forcing_ to a float

To complete the discussion:

 >>> a = N.arange(4)
 >>> type(N.median(a))
<type 'numpy.float64'>
 >>> a = N.arange(4)
 >>> N.median(a)
1.5
 >>> type(N.median(a))
<type 'numpy.float64'>
 >>> a = N.arange(5)
 >>> N.median(a)
2
 >>> type(N.median(a))
<type 'numpy.int32'>

So median converts to a float if it needs to, and keeps it an integer 
otherwise, which seems reasonable to me, though it would be nice to 
specify a dtype, so that you can make sure you always get a float if you 
want one.

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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