I am very new to LISP (so forgive me for any dumb mistakes) and the first lab of the year states:
Define a function, STDEV that will compute the standard deviation of a list of numbers (look up formula)
I wrote this code but I don't know why it refuses to work:
(defun stdev (x)
(sqrt (/ (apply '+ (expt (- x (/ (apply '+ x)
(length x)))
2))
(length x))))
(setq a '(1 2 3 4 5))
(STDEV a)
But on runtime it produces the error:
(1 2 3 4 5) is not a number
I believe that I have correctly emulated the standard deviation formula (though I wouldn't put it past myself to make a dumb mistake), but why does my program not like the list of numbers that I give it to evaluate? It is most likely a simple mistake with inputs from this new style of coding but any and all help is greatly appreciated!
Use indentation. I've edited your question:
(defun stdev (x)
(sqrt (/ (apply '+ (expt (- x (/ (apply '+ x)
(length x)))
2))
(length x))))
expt returns a number. You call (apply '+ some-number)?
Also you subtract a number from a list.
Why?
Generally I would recommend to use a Lisp listener (aka REPL) to get to working code:
Compute the mean value:
CL-USER 21 > (let ((l (list 1 2 3 4 5)))
(/ (reduce #'+ l)
(length l)))
3
Subtract the mean value and square using mapcar:
CL-USER 22 > (mapcar (lambda (item)
(expt (- item 3) 2))
(list 1 2 3 4 5))
(4 1 0 1 4)
Compute the variance as the mean value of above:
CL-USER 23 > (let ((l (list 4 1 0 1 4)))
(/ (reduce #'+ l)
(length l)))
2
Take the square root to get the standard deviation:
CL-USER 24 > (sqrt 2)
1.4142135
Then you only need to assemble it into a few functions: average, variance and standard-deviation.