Python - How to check list monotonicity

It's better to avoid ambiguous terms like "increasing" or "decreasing" as it's not clear if equality is acceptable or not. You should always use either for example "non-increasing" (clearly equality is accepted) or "strictly decreasing" (clearly equality is NOT accepted).

def strictly_increasing(L):
    return all(x<y for x, y in zip(L, L[1:]))

def strictly_decreasing(L):
    return all(x>y for x, y in zip(L, L[1:]))

def non_increasing(L):
    return all(x>=y for x, y in zip(L, L[1:]))

def non_decreasing(L):
    return all(x<=y for x, y in zip(L, L[1:]))

def monotonic(L):
    return non_increasing(L) or non_decreasing(L)

If you have large lists of numbers it might be best to use numpy, and if you are:

import numpy as np

def monotonic(x):
    dx = np.diff(x)
    return np.all(dx <= 0) or np.all(dx >= 0)

should do the trick.