Forums >Suggestions and Feature Requests>Calculate grade
Good Bad & The Monkey
I'm running somewhere tomorrow. It's going to be beautiful. I can't wait.
Poor baby
... I think the best way to come up with a rating system is to see how a course affects someone's finish time. Anyone here a statistician? Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
These are good metrics, although I am concerned that using finish times alone may introduce some bias. In a relatively tough course or a small marathon, you are less likely to get an international elite crowd. In that case, the results may be skewed towards slower finish times both due to the difficulty of the course and the lesser average abilities of the participants.
If a person ran in both of these courses, and one is significantly slower than the other, we can assume that one is harder than another.
My experience this past weekend disproves this assumption.
I would suggest that you need to include road surface and absolute elevation above sea level as covariates.
Didn't you say you're a part time statistician? We all know that one person doesn't really matter ;-) The elevation is included in the math somewhere. As for road surface, maybe we can adjust the overall equation as such: difficulty = (sum(u) + sum(d)) * w * s where s is 1 for road, and 1 + c for other surface types.
Runners run