Sliding Window Moving Average | Dataford Interview Questions

Arista EOS telemetry can produce a sequence of numeric samples such as interface utilization or packet rates. Given the samples and a fixed window size, return the average for every contiguous window of that size.

Implement moving_average(nums, k) using a sliding window. Each output value must equal the arithmetic mean of one window, starting with nums[0:k] and advancing one position at a time.

Formal Specification

Input: nums, a non-empty list of integers or floating-point numbers, and k, a positive integer window size.
Output: A list of floating-point averages with length len(nums) - k + 1.
Windows must preserve the original order and may overlap.

Constraints

1 <= k <= len(nums) <= 10^5
-10^6 <= nums[i] <= 10^6
The output contains exactly len(nums) - k + 1 values
Standard floating-point division is used

Function Signature

def moving_average(nums, k):

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