Moving Average Implementation | Dataford Interview Questions

Citadel's quantitative research workflows often process ordered market observations and summarize them over fixed windows. Given a list of numeric observations, return the moving average for every contiguous window of a specified size.

Use a sliding-window approach so each new average updates the previous sum instead of recomputing all values in the window.

Formal Specification

Implement moving_average(nums, window_size).

nums is a non-empty list of integers or floating-point numbers.
window_size is an integer between 1 and len(nums), inclusive.
Return a list of floating-point averages, one for each contiguous window of length window_size.
The output length must be len(nums) - window_size + 1.

Constraints

1 <= len(nums) <= 10^5
1 <= window_size <= len(nums)
-10^9 <= nums[i] <= 10^9
Each input contains at least one valid window

Function Signature

def moving_average(nums, window_size):

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