Calculating arithmetic mean (one type of average) in Python

Is there a built-in or standard library method in Python to calculate the arithmetic mean (one type of average) of a list of numbers?

I am not aware of anything in the standard library. However, you could use something like:

def mean(numbers):
    return float(sum(numbers)) / max(len(numbers), 1)

>>> mean([1,2,3,4])
2.5
>>> mean([])
0.0

In numpy, there's numpy.mean().

NumPy has a numpy.mean which is an arithmetic mean. Usage is as simple as this:

>>> import numpy
>>> a = [1, 2, 4]
>>> numpy.mean(a)
2.3333333333333335

Use statistics.mean:

import statistics
print(statistics.mean([1,2,4])) # 2.3333333333333335

It's available since Python 3.4. For 3.1-3.3 users, an old version of the module is available on PyPI under the name stats. Just change statistics to stats.