geometric.mean function

Find the geometric mean of a vector or columns of a data.frame.

The geometric mean is the nth root of n products or e to the mean log of x. Useful for describing non-normal, i.e., geometric distributions.

geometric.mean(x,na.rm=TRUE)

Arguments

• x: a vector or data.frame
• na.rm: remove NA values before processing

Details

Useful for teaching how to write functions, also useful for showing the different ways of estimating central tendency.

Returns

geometric mean(s) of x or x.df.

Author(s)

William Revelle

Note

Not particularly useful if there are elements that are <= 0.

See Also

harmonic.mean, mean

Examples

x <- seq(1,5)
x2 <- x^2
x2[2] <- NA
X <- data.frame(x,x2)
geometric.mean(x)
geometric.mean(x2)
geometric.mean(X)
geometric.mean(X,na.rm=FALSE)