Moving Average Sliding Window | Dataford Interview Questions

Kronos market-monitoring tools receive a chronological sequence of stock prices. Given the prices and a window size, return the average price for every contiguous window of that size.

Use a rolling sum so that each price enters and leaves the active window once. Return the results from left to right, where the first result corresponds to prices[0:window].

Formal Specification

Implement moving_average(prices, window):

Input: prices, a list of integers or floating-point numbers, and window, a positive integer.
Output: A list of floating-point averages with length len(prices) - window + 1.
Each average should be calculated as the exact arithmetic mean of its corresponding contiguous window. Python's normal floating-point behavior is acceptable.

Constraints

1 <= window <= len(prices)
1 <= len(prices) <= 100,000
-10^6 <= prices[i] <= 10^6
Prices are integers or floating-point numbers
Do not modify prices

Function Signature

def moving_average(prices, window):

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