Quote from: Pionwave on May 12, 2013, 03:39:01 AM

Quote from: eleuthria on May 11, 2013, 11:24:35 PM

Quote from: organofcorti on May 11, 2013, 11:19:52 PM

Ah, I knew what you meant - anyone can verify my integrity Wink

Shill! Shenanigans! Fluffed audit! Clearly paid propaganda! We're onto you! /s

I heard it was a reptilian conspiracy...

Damn Reptoids!

Quote from: Pionwave on May 12, 2013, 03:39:01 AM

Switching from BTCGuild to Bitminter PPLNS about a month and a half ago, without using any of my big pile'o'nmc, i'm still doing just as well.

I'm new to Bitminter, and one thing that wasn't clear and i think would be great in the statistics is the amount of historical blocks solves daily showing the trend. As there are some rough days.. but over the month and half it has been fairly even.. adding the trend may help the newer miners to see that it's worth slugging through the rough days.

The thing is that there should never be a trend in data consisting of independent identically distributed random variables (iid). Looking for a trend would only serve to test if the data was iid or not, and that's not easy or intuitive for miners to follow - it would just be a p-value of a particular test to find trends.

Where people often see trends is in moving averages. The problem with that is the moving average can't be said to have a trend, since the data it contains is no longer iid - each moving average data point is influenced by previous data points. Same goes for cumulative means and sums.

As an example, if you take data that is by definition random ( say generated random data) and take a moving average of the variables, you'll also see "trends". However since we already know the data is random, there can't be any trends.

That's not to say a moving average has no use - we can use it to test when data is no longer within certain confidence intervals, and might help guide us to data that appears "wrong". But the use to which many miners put a moving average is to predict future luck, and that can't happen. I'm paraphrasing what someone here wrote, (eleuthria or DrH, or maybe gyverlb? Can't remember) but we can't speak of periods of good luck or bad luck. Luck has happened in the past, but that has no bearing at all on luck in the future.

This is a problem that we've seen before in p2Pool - even someone as mathematically literate as kano fell into the trap of considering a moving average as a trend, and I didn't hadn't figured out how to explain why it couldn't.

Edit: Another example - if you take the same data the shows a "trend" and instead of a moving average of n periods, just take the average every n periods, there is no detectable trend at all.

tl'dr: Trend analysis is hard, and moving averages can't show trends.