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This tutorial will discuss finding the mean or average of an array using the function in MATLAB mean().

Use the MATLAB mean()function to find the average of an array

To find the mean of an array, we can use Matlab's inbuilt function mean(). If we pass a vector or array, mean()the function will return the average of all the elements in the array. For example, let's mean()find the mean of a vector using the function. See the code below.

vect = [1 3 5];
averg = mean(vect)

Output:

averg =

     3

If the input is a matrix, then mean()the function will return a row vector containing the mean of each matrix column. For example, suppose you have a matrix with three columns. Then mean()the function will return a row vector with three elements which will be the mean of each column. For example, let's use mean()the function to find the mean of the matrix columns. See the code below.

vect = [1 3 5; 2 3 6]
averg = mean(vect)

Output:

vect =

     1     3     5
     2     3     6


averg =

    1.5000    3.0000    5.5000

As you can see, the input matrix has three columns and the output has three elements, one for each column. If you don't want to take the mean of the columns, you want to take the mean of the rows. You can mean()specify this as the second argument in the function. You have to add the second argument, which will be an integer 2. For example, let's use mean()the function to find the mean of the rows of a matrix. See the code below.

vect = [1 3 5; 2 3 6]
averg = mean(vect,2)

Output:

vect =

     1     3     5
     2     3     6


averg =

    3.0000
    3.6667

As you can see, the input matrix has two rows and the output has two elements, one for each row. You can also specify the output file type or the data type of the output as mean()the second argument in the function. For example, you can specify that the output should be double or native. For example, let's define the data type of the above matrix as double. See the code below.

vect = [1 3 5; 2 3 6]
averg = mean(vect,'double')

Output:

vect =

     1     3     5
     2     3     6


averg =

    1.5000    3.0000    5.5000

If you don't want to use mean()the function, you can also use the sum()and length()functions to find the average. We know that the average is equal to the sum of the elements divided by the number of elements. We can use sum()the function to get the sum of the elements and length()the function to get the number of elements, and then we need to divide the sum by the length to get the average.