Mean for empty tensor

I found that when I x.mean() for an empty tensor x, I got nan. Is it intended or not?
I think it would confuse people.

Hi,

I think this behavior is intentional as it makes more sense than anything to me, at least.
This is the prefered implementation in numpy too.

Personally, I think mean of empty tensor can be defined in this way: nothing/len(nothing) or clearer version [nan] / len([nan]) which only can produce two kind of output, 1. crash in runtime! 2. nan as the output
(I did not read the source code so I might be wrong about how it works exactly)

Also, if you look more intuitively, if we do not want to raise an exception, the best scenario is nan as there are many numerical operation that might produce nan as an unexpected bahvior.

Can you explain what is your idea and prefered bahvior? And why it would confuse people?

Bests

Thanks for the reply.
Well, I think mean() of an empty tensor should be an empty tensor.

How can we consider empty when we for sure know that len(an empty array)=0 ?
Actually, this happens:
torch.sum(a) / len(a), and obviously len(a)=0, so if torch.sum(a) becomes anything rather than 0, then division by zero exception will occur.
Also, torch.sum(torch.tensor([np.nan])) = tensor[nan] so [nan] / 0 = nan.

Although there might be some other reasons due to stability which I do not know about.

The main question that I have too is that why the sum of empty array is zero? Although in the case of mean, it won’t make a difference as nan/nan = nan = zero/nan .
After googling, I found that in numpy, fortran intrinsics follow this behavior:

So as torch tries to implement similar behavior to numpy, same idea is happening here.

I hope someone can explain more accurately.