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Statistics to Keep Track of Average Found Location


KonstantinMMRR

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I enjoy looking at the personal statistics kept for geocaching. I think one important part is missing. There should be an average latitude and longitude for all caches found by that member. As an example, if we regularly find caches near and around our home area, the average center point would be at about our home. Then, when we find a few caches across the country, that would pull our center point over some. It seems like this would be easy for the website to calculate.

 

What are your thoughts?

 

Thank you.

 

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1 hour ago, MartyBartfast said:

Groundspeak don't provide this info, but project-GC does

 

Indeed.  So does the GSAK FindStatGen macro, though I think they differ slightly on their calculations.

 

There's another GSAK macro called Centroid Track (or something similar) that will actually create a map of your centroid and how it shifted day to day.  You can see ours bouncing around Germany for the first few months, then it started to arc its away to the USA when we got over 100 finds in Texas, then it started coming back.  Then it started going to the US again and shifted tracks a few times every time we moved.  And now we are back in Germany - so it's starting to curve its way back.

 

If I remember, I'll post a screen shot with the correct macro name.

Edited by hzoi
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48 minutes ago, hzoi said:

 

Indeed.  So does the GSAK FindStatGen macro, though I think they differ slightly on their calculations.

 

There's another GSAK macro called Centroid Track (or something similar) that will actually create a map of your centroid and how it shifted day to day.  You can see ours bouncing around Germany for the first few months, then it started to arc its away to the USA when we got over 100 finds in Texas, then it started coming back.  Then it started going to the US again and shifted tracks a few times every time we moved.  And now we are back in Germany - so it's starting to curve its way back.

 

If I remember, I'll post a screen shot with the correct macro name.

 

I don't know how it's calculated but mine is 183 miles from my home location and near Ottawa, Canada.  I have never found a cache in Canada.

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1 hour ago, NYPaddleCacher said:

I don't know how it's calculated

The algorithm that makes the most sense to me (which I think was mentioned by fizzymagic years ago) would be to consider the locations of your finds as points in 3-dimensional space. Then those points are averaged in 3-dimensional space, and a line is projected from the center of the earth, through that average point, and through the surface of the earth. That point on the surface of the earth is the centroid.

 

But I have no idea how any of these systems calculate the centroid without getting weird results when someone has finds that straddle W/E 180°, or with certain other edge cases.

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5 hours ago, KonstantinMMRR said:

I enjoy looking at the personal statistics kept for geocaching. I think one important part is missing. There should be an average latitude and longitude for all caches found by that member. As an example, if we regularly find caches near and around our home area, the average center point would be at about our home. Then, when we find a few caches across the country, that would pull our center point over some. It seems like this would be easy for the website to calculate.

What are your thoughts?

 

Maybe it's just me, but it seems when other, third-party sites are already doing a function (stats especially...),  there's often little return for this site to go through the work of creating  their own version.      :)

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18 hours ago, cerberus1 said:

 

Maybe it's just me, but it seems when other, third-party sites are already doing a function (stats especially...),  there's often little return for this site to go through the work of creating  their own version.      :)

 

I have on a few occasions suggested that GS get out of the statistics system reporting business and allow users to integrate the output of third-party sites onto their statistics tab.  That said, I've been paying for a premium membership for 12 years and don't want to see GS get into a mode that they'll just let third party sites implement functionality if its something that a significant number of users want, especially when some of those 3rd party sites have an additional cost or require a specific hardware/software platform.  

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