does bin smoothing make guns better or worse

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Instead of applying methods of estimating the correct amounts of bin smoothing, people tend to switch to kernel density and tune the kernel function. There was a lot of discussion about the best kernel function and the best function width. The optimal changes for each opponent and some kind of averaging is needed, which is usually estimated through genetic tuning.

In guns, smoothing usually has no effect because you don't need to estimate the PDF, you only need to find the peak. But when you superpose many PDFs together (swarm targeting), things change.

MN (talk)01:51, 25 November 2013

Estimating the PDF can still a useful component of finding the peak when not superimposing things, particular when the density of observations is sufficiently low. The main reasons you don't see much effect in targeting is that the usual bin sizes inherently act similar to a certain amount of smoothing anyway, and for targeting you have a larger number of observations than movement which reduces the amount of smoothing that makes sense as well. Consider what happens when your bins are significantly smaller than what is typical without any additional smoothing. (A targeting system that accounts for botwidth also reduces the amount of smoothing that makes sense, but that's a bit of a different matter)

Rednaxela (talk)14:41, 25 November 2013

For me two things make smoothing more useful in movement than in targeting:

  1. Movement needs to estimate probability at arbitrary points, instead of a single peak, so the location the probability is required at isn't related to where data is available.
  2. Movement has much less data than targeting, so smoothing is needed to fill in gaps in knowledge.

Theoretically smoothing might help in targeting, but all my testing has shown that a simple square kernel works just as well or better, while running many times faster.

I've also considered something like Kalman filters, but they are Unimodal which doesn't work for targeting or movement at all. Perhaps particle filters, although the histogram filters we have right now in VCS also work pretty well.

Skilgannon (talk)22:07, 25 November 2013

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