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Re: [RC] LD/50 times - Truman Prevatt

terre wrote:
Truman said:

> I think you guys are involved in more of an academic exercise
> than anything else.

Well, of course we are! What else is ridecamp for? You don't think we're accomplishing anything substantive, do you?

It is 'academically' interesting, though, to discuss the different factors that can influence the data. This sport is SO complex, involving so many variables, that to draw any hard-and-fast conclusions from any of the data we gather is something of a reach.
Actually it's not deriving conclusions from the data, 50's are riding faster. What is dicey is providing an interpretation to what that data says. That's where you always get into trouble. It's not what the data says but why it is that way. I prefer to leave interpretation to the philosophers and theologians ;-) .

Ride times are influenced by a host of factors--weather and terrain, etc as discussed. But there are other things to consider. Was the winning time an "anomaly" in the sense that the winner was WAY ahead of the next horse? Having a 'superstar' winning a number of races with the rest of the field far behind can skew the apparent data, if you look only at the 'winning time'. Perhaps it would be more valuable to look at the median or mean times. Got a couple of 100 hours to do that?


Actually when I was looking at the data for 2002 I did. There was no apparent skewing in the data. The distribution is not normal (bell) it tends to be a skewed bell curve (mode, median nor mean are the same) since very few riders take a prolonged time. Skew normal distributions appear in a lot of application. The 50's and LD's appeared to have the same shape but I didn't calculate the skew parameter.
David mentioned pull rates/times with respect to season, and that's a valuable observation. It's possible there are somewhat higher pulls later in the year, as the horses start to tire or develop problems--I think there are certainly fewer STARTS late in the season as people decide "enough is enough" and stay home with horses who are starting to show problems--as well they should! That could slow down winning times, as well.
It also depends on the region. Late in your season is the start of ours. The beauty of statistical analysis is by it's very nature it deals well with extracting trends from 'noisy.' Such things as hot weather one ride, cold another are part of the noise process. They are independent of the endurance rides and tend to behave in a well understood manner (from a probabilistic sense). It is concerned at analyzing the data at the probabilistic level. As long as there are not deterministic biasing given enough data the trends will emerge.

The variables are almost infinite!
They may be large but they are not infinite.

Truman

--

“Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.” Albert Einstein


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[RC] LD/50 times, terre