I am creating a system dynamic and agent-based model for my dissertation.
Numbers generated through the different flows must be added back to the start to continue through the process.
For example, numbers flow from a parameter to stock 1, which goes through a flow process at a specific rate to stock 2. From stock 2, there is another flow process based on a particular rate to stock 3. The numbers from stock 3 need to go back into stock 1 to repeat the process.
Methods I have tried have been adding flows, links, and changing the initial value of stock 1.
Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Updated:
Added screenshots.
I think it is because of the difference between the two flows, e.g. a -9 based on the difference between flow and flow3 as shown in the screenshot.
Screenshots:
Graph of Stock 1
Model as a whole
In system dynamics, if you want to have a circular system (feedback loop) it needs to contain as a minimum 1 stock inside the loop, which means that there is at least 1 delay in the feedback loop
I will explain your model
stock has an outflow of 20 (flow), and an inflow of 11 (flow3)... this produces a net outflow of 9/timeUnit
This is what you see in the graph... and it doesn't even matter if your system is circular or not, that stock will lose 9/timeUnit forever.
Your wording is very strange when you say "numbers are generated and numbers are flowing"... it's not numbers that flow through your system... you can't really say "i have 3 numbers per minute flowing into a pool of numbers"
In your model, the "numbers" are definitely going back to the initial stock, but system dynamics is like water flowing, it is not a discrete paradigm, so you will not see the same "numbers" going back because system dynamics doesn't differentiate what individual "numbers" are flowing.
It's so weird already to have to use the word numbers to be consistent with your question.
So in order to have a better answer, you will need to specify:
what is the behavior you see in here
what is the behavior you expect, and how it differs from what you see
what would you need to see in the system in order to say "yes, my system in working exactly as expected"
It would help if you let us know what your system represents, and if you use names that represents what is flowing through the system (instead of using numbers, stock and flow, because any explanation becomes confusing)
We track an internal entity with java.util generated UUID. New requirement is to pass this object to a third party who requires a unique identifier with a max character limit of 11. In lieu of generating, tracking and mapping an entirely new unique ID we are wondering if it is viable to use a substring of the UUID as a calculated field. The number of records is at most 10 million.
java.util.UUID.randomUUID().toString() // code used to generate
Quotes from other resources (incl. SOF):
"....only after generating 1 billion UUIDs every second for approximately 100 years would the probability of creating a single duplicate reach 50%."
"Also be careful with generating longer UUIDs and substring-ing them, since some parts of the ID may contain fixed bytes (e.g. this is the case with MAC, DCE and MD5 UUIDs)."
We will check out existing IDs' substrings for duplicates. What are the chances the substring would generate a duplicate?
This is an instance of the Birthday Problem. One formulation of B.P.: Given a choice of n values sampled randomly with replacement, how many values can we sample before the same value will be seen at least twice with probability p?
For the classic instance of the problem,
p = 0.5, n = the 365 days of the year
and the answer is 23. In other words, the odds are 50% that two people share the same birthday when you are surveying 23 people.
You can plug in
n = the number of possible UUIDs
instead to get that kind of cosmically large sample size required for a 50% probability of a collision — something like the billion-per-second figure. It is
n = 16^32
for a 32-character string of 16 case-insensitive hex digits.
B.P. a relatively expensive problem to compute, as there is no known closed-form formula for it. In fact, I just tried it for your 11-character substring (n = 16^11) on Wolfram Alpha Pro, and it timed out.
However, I found an efficient implementation of a closed-form estimate here. And here's my adaptation of the Python.
import math
def find(p, n):
return math.ceil(math.sqrt(2 * n * math.log(1/(1-p))))
If I plug in the classic B.P. numbers, I get an answer of 23, which is right. For the full UUID numbers,
find(.5, math.pow(16, 32)) / 365 / 24 / 60 / 60 / 100
my result is actually close to 7 billion UUID per second for 100 years! Maybe this estimate is too coarse for large numbers, though I don't know what method your source used.
For the 11-character string? You only have to generate about 5 million IDs total to reach the 50% chance of a collision. For 1%, it's only about 600,000 total. And that's probably overestimating safety, compared to your source (and which we are already guilty of by assuming the substring is random).
My engineering advice: Do you really need the guarantees that UUIDs provide aside from uniqueness, such as non-enumerability, and assurance against collisions in a distributed context? If not, then just use a sequential ID, and avoid these complications.
I am analysing if 15 books can be grouped according to 6 variables (of the 15 books, 2 are written by an author, 6 by an other one, and 7 by an other one). I counted the number of occurrences of the variables and I calculated the percentage. Then I used Orange software to use PCA. I uploaded the file. selected the columns and rows. And when it comes to PCA the program asks me if I want to normalize the data or not, but I am not sure about that because I have already calculated the percentage - is normalize different from calculating the percentage? Moreover, below the normalize button it asks me to show only:... and I have to choose a number between 0 and 100 but I don’t really know what it is.
Could you help me understand what I should do? Thank you in advance
I want to find the inter annotator agreement for few annotators.
Annotators annotates few categories (out of 10 categories) for each subjects.
For e.g. there are 3 annotator , 10 categories and 100 subjects .
I am aware about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen's_kappa (For two annotators) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleiss%27_kappa (for more than two annotators) inter annotator agreement but I realized that they may not work if user annotates more than one category for any subject.
Do anyone has any idea for determining inter annotation agreement in this scenario.
Thanks
i had to do this several years back. i cant recall how exactly i did it(i dont have code anymore) but i have a worked example to report to my professor. i was dealing with annotation of comments and have 56 categories and 4 annotators.
note:at the time i need a way to detect where annotators most disagree so that after each annotation session they can focus on why they disagree and set out reasonable rules to maximize this statistic. it worked well for that purpose
Let's assume A-D are annotators and 1-5 are categories. This is a possible scenario.
A B C D Probability of agreement
1 X X X X 4/4
2 X X X 3/4
3 X X 2/4
4 X 1/4
5
A tags this comment as 1,2,3,4 B->1,2,3, and so forth.
For each category the probability of agreement is calculated.
Which is then divided by the number of unique categories tagged for that particular comment.
Therefore for the example comment, we have 10/16 as annotator's agreement. This is a value between 0 and 1.
if this doesnt work for you then (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli.07-034-R2) pg-567, which was referenced by pg-587 case study.
Compute agreement on a per-label basis. If you treat one of the annotators as the gold standard, you can then compute recall and precision on label assignments. Another option is label overlap, which would be the proportion of subjects where either annotator assigned a category where the both assigned it (intersection over union).
In an online manager game (like Hattrick), I want to simulate matches between two teams.
A team consists of 11 players. Every player has a strength value between 1 and 100. I take these strength values of the defensive players for each team and calculate the average. That's the defensive quality of a team. Then I take the strengths of the offensive players and I get the offensive quality.
For each attack, I do the following:
$offFactor = ($attackerTeam_offensive-$defenderTeam_defensive)/max($attackerTeam_offensive, $defenderTeam_defensive);
$defFactor = ($defenderTeam_defensive-$attackerTeam_offensive)/max($defenderTeam_defensive, $attackerTeam_offensive);
At the moment, I don't know why I divide it by the higher one of both values. But this formula should give you a factor for the quality of offense and defense which is needed later.
Then I have nested conditional statements for each event which could happen. E.g.: Does the attacking team get a scoring chance?
if ((mt_rand((-10+$offAdditionalFactor-$defAdditionalFactor), 10)/10)+$offFactor >= 0)
{ ... // the attack succeeds
These additional factors could be tactical values for example.
Do you think this is a good way of calculating a game? My users say that they aren't satisfied with the quality of the simulations. How can I improve them? Do you have different approaches which could give better results? Or do you think that my approach is good and I only need to adjust the values in the conditional statements and experiment a bit?
I hope you can help me. Thanks in advance!
Here is a way I would do it.
Offensive/Defensive Quality
First lets work out the average strength of the entire team:
Team.Strength = SUM(Players.Strength) / 11
Now we want to split out side in two, and work out the average for our defensive players, and our offensive players.]
Defense.Strength = SUM(Defensive_Players.Strength)/Defensive_Players.Count
Offense.Strength = SUM(Offense_Players.Strength)/Offense_Players.Count
Now, we have three values. The first, out Team average, is going to be used to calculate our odds of winning. The other two, are going to calculate our odds of defending and our odds of scoring.
A team with a high offensive average is going to have more chances, a team with a high defense is going to have more chance at saving.
Now if we have to teams, lets call them A and B.
Team A, have an average of 80, An offensive score of 85 and a defensive score of 60.
Team B, have an average of 70, An offensive score of 50 and a defensive score of 80.
Now, based on the average. Team A, should have a better chance at winning. But by how much?
Scoring and Saving
Lets work out how many times goals Team A should score:
A.Goals = (A.Offensive / B.Defensive) + RAND()
= (85/80) + 0.8;
= 1.666
I have assumed the random value adds anything between -1 and +1, although you can adjust this.
As we can see, the formula indicates team A should score 1.6 goals. we can either round this up/down. Or give team A 1, and calculate if the other one is allowed (random chance).
Now for Team B
B.Goals = (B.Offensive / A.Defensive) + RAND()
= (50/60) + 0.2;
= 1.03
So we have A scoring 1 and B scoring 1. But remember, we want to weight this in A's favour, because, overall, they are the better team.
So what is the chance A will win?
Chance A Will Win = (A.Average / B.Average)
= 80 / 70
= 1.14
So we can see the odds are 14% (.14) in favor of A winning the match. We can use this value to see if there is any change in the final score:
if Rand() <= 0.14 then Final Score = A 2 - 1 B Otherwise A 1 - 1 B
If our random number was 0.8, then the match is a draw.
Rounding Up and Further Thoughts
You will definitely want to play around with the values. Remember, game mechanics are very hard to get right. Talk to your players, ask them why they are dissatisfied. Are there teams always losing? Are the simulations always stagnant? etc.
The above outline is deeply affected by the randomness of the selection. You will want to normalise it so the chances of a team scoring an extra 5 goals is very very rare. But a little randomness is a great way to add some variety to the game.
There are ways to edit this method as well. For example instead of the number of goals, you could use the Goal figure as the number of scoring chances, and then have another function that worked out the number of goals based on other factors (i.e. choose a random striker, and use that players individual stats, and the goalies, to work out if there is a goal)
I hope this helps.
The most basic tactical decision in football is picking formation, which is a set of three numbers which assigns the 10 outfield players to defence, midfield and attack, respectively, e.g. 4/4/2.
If you use average player strength, you don't merely lose that tactic, you have it going backwards: the strongest defence is one with a single very good player, giving him any help will make it more likely the other team score. If you have one player with a rating of 10, the average is 10. Add another with rating 8, and the average drops (to 9). But assigning more people to defence should make it stronger, not weaker.
So first thing, you want to make everything be based on the total, not the average. The ratio between the totals is a good scale-independent way of determining which teams is stronger and by how much. Ratios tend to be better than differences, because they work in a predictable way with teams of any range of strengths. You can set up a combat results table that says how many goals are scored (per game, per half, per move, or whatever).
The next tactical choice is whether it is better to have one exceptional player, or several good ones. You can make that matter that by setting up scenarios that represent things that happen in game, e.g. a 1 on 1, a corner, or a long ball. The players involved in a scenario are first randomly chosen, then the result of the scenario is rolled for. One result can be that another scenario starts (midfield pass leads to cross leads to header chance).
The final step, which would bring you pretty much up to the level of actual football manager games, is to give players more than one type of strength rating, e.g., heading, passing, shooting, and so on. Then you use the strength rating appropriate to the scenario they are in.
The division in your example is probably a bad idea, because it changes the scale of the output variable depending on which side is better. Generally when comparing two quantities you either want interval data (subtract one from the other) or ratio data (divide one by the other) but not both.
A better approach in this case would be to simply divide the offensive score by the defensive score. If both are equal, the result will be 1. If the attacker is better than the defender, it will be greater than 1, and if the defender is stronger, it will be less than one. These are easy numbers to work with.
Also, instead of averaging the whole team, average parts of the team depending on the formations or tactics used. This will allow teams to choose to play offensively or defensively and see the pros and cons of this.
And write yourself some better random number generation functions. One that returns floating point values between -1 and 1 and one that works from 0 to 1, for starters. Use these in your calculations and you can avoid all those confusing 10s everywhere!
You might also want to ask the users what about the simulation they don't like. It's possible that, rather than seeing the final outcome of the game, they want to know how many times their team had an opportunity to attack but the defense regained control. So instead of
"Your team wins 2-1"
They want to see match highlights:
"Your team wins 2-1:
- scored at minute 15,
- other team took control and went for tried for a goal at minute 30,
but the shoot was intercepted,
- we took control again and $PLAYER1 scored a beautiful goal!
... etc
You can use something like what Jamie suggests for a starting point, choose the times at random, and maybe pick who scored the goal based on a weighted sampling of the offensive players (i.e. a player with a higher score gets a higher chance of being the one who scored). You can have fun and add random low-probability events like a red card on a player, someone injuring themselves, streakers across the field...
The average should be the number of players... using the max means if you have 3 player teams:
[4 4 4]
[7 4 1]
The second one would be considered weaker. Is that what you want? I think you would rather do something like:
(Total Scores / Total Players) + (Max Score / Total Players), so in the above example it would make the second team slightly better.
I guess it depends on how you feel the teams should be balanced.