Rolling Averages?
 

Several Fuelly Members at the Bimmerfest Forums have been discussing the benefit of a 3, 6, or 12 month rolling average for our Fuelly tags. I think that would a great idea to make that a user profile option. Is thart possible?

Thanks,
D

That's an interesting idea. The problem is with our capacity. We're serving up way, way more of these Fuelly signature images than we ever thought we would. Thousands per second. We've had to rearrange the way we store data to make the numbers you see on the signatures fast.

Calculating a rolling average for every car at that rate would be difficult for us the way things are structured now. We'll add it to our list of things to consider, but it's something that would take quite a bit of work to achieve. So we have to ask ourselves if the majority of Fuelly users are going to take advantage of the feature to make the work worthwhile. I'm not positive that's the case with rolling averages, but we will think about it.

Thanks. I know one member who is doing it manually by deleting old fill-ups. I'm sitting on the fence as whether the manual process is worth the effort. BTW, the Fuelly tag is a great idea and by your capacity issues, I see many people have the same opinion.

D

Well, you could throw it in as a browser (non mobile) client side script and take the work off your servers and people could have their own computers calculate it at need, that way the "partial fill up" data could be used as well which is currently stale data.

This thread is 5 years old...
pb is no longer the owner of Fuelly.

Re; your partial fills- looking at your log book, all of your fills are marked as partial. It looks like you just pump in a set dollar amount each fuel up. I can understand that. But without a couple of full fillups every so often, there's really no way (without sensors in the tank to gauge capacity and fuel level) to track just how much fuel you're using per mile to calculate your fuel economy.

Well with numerical analysis you could build an approximation spline that would get corrected with more and more data, basically your initial "guess" would be the vehicle manufacturers stated fuel economy and allow the partial data to slowly "correct" that. Without doing the math I'd say you'd need 10+ fill ups of 30 L or so before you could get some indicator if your vehicle is operating above or below standard; a few more and you'd be able to tell if your millage is going up or down or steady. A forcing function could even be introduced for complete fill ups to correct the data when they're performed making it yet more accurate. Having a couple of years of comp sci and math behind me I thought I'd opine into the ether to see if anyone had had this notion previously and dismissed it or not.

With regard to the rolling averages idea, I like it. Make it a setting in the profile, and have that average calculated at fill-up time and stored. Then, it's just a retrieval from the db and not an actual calculation determined when the info is requested. And, with the way that systems work today, that info could be cached at the web server where the signature is for a period of time. So, subsequent loads of the page (or of other pages containing a particular sig) would not traverse the Internet at all.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll pass these posts along to the rest of the team for review.