Anonymous user
Talk:Averages/Mean angle: Difference between revisions
→Accuracy: It has its uses.
(→Accuracy: It has its uses.) |
|||
Line 17:
:::: That's one problem of the task: given an angle a and an integer n, equation n x == a doesn't have a unique solution for x. Which one you pick depends on what use scenario you want, converting angles to unit vectors, averaging them and converting back is simply not a universal solution. Suppose you see three of your flashes and want to choose a heading so you can get closer to investigate; if the degrees of the angles were 10, 20 and 30, you can head to 20 and that's that, but if then angles were 0, -95 and 95, there's no intuitive way to say which direction to go. By your math you'd be going to 0, but you'd be getting closer to one source while getting further away from the other two (I'm not saying you should go the opposite dirction: it depends on what kind of "getting closer to the sources" you really want). Another thing, as currently specified, you average vectors, then keep the angle and discard the amplitude from the result, thus losing relevant information, which just can't be a good way to do things. As a result, you end up with singularities when the result vector is small, and a potential arbitrary "mean value".--[[User:Ledrug|Ledrug]] 03:24, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
:::Take a look at [[wp:Directional statistics]] and the other pages it might link to, as well as talk pages. I got the impression that this is not for all angular measurements - sometimes the number of turns is significant; and it is easy to get answers that are computed correctly but without checking the amplitude of the resultant mean of vectors, you miss out on information on what credence to give to the result. What is the mean of 0 and 180 degrees? the amplitude of the resultant is zero so any angle returned is of no import.
:::There does seem to be situations where the formula is applied to give meaningful results. You might be stimulating a species of land mammal in a controlled environment and monitoring in which direction they, ran for example. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 06:15, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
| |||