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Re:Ask HN: Figure out the routes of LA Street Cleaners from ... by shortoncash on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @09:31PM (#9385392)
You should create geographic bins and sort your tickets into them. Then for each bin, you should identify the number of peaks in the distribution of ticket timestamps associated with a bin. Operating under the assumption that the distribution of timestamps is the sum of multiple distributions (a convolution) each with a well defined mean, each peak represents the mean time when -a- vehicle arrives at your designated geographic bin to assign a ticket.

Now, with all your peaks sorted out for each bin, you want to construct a graph from bin to bin where your graph is constructed where an adjacent node in the graph is added if the numerical distance between the two peaks is the smallest of all choices. You should iteratively repeat the process until all the relevant bins are connected

Then brute force the permutations of arrangements of peaks and you should get a rough approximation of the path of the person issuing tickets.

Re:Ask HN: Figure out the routes of LA Street Cleaners from ... by davidhegarty on Thursday April 16, 2015 @09:03PM (#9391725)
@shortoncash - I like that approach! If you live up to your username, do you've any interest in doing it as a side project?
Re:Ask HN: Figure out the routes of LA Street Cleaners from ... by avitalp on Friday April 17, 2015 @12:37AM (#9392286)
@shortoncash: I like this solution a lot!

@David, are you able to put up a small test batch of the data on GitHub?

Re:Ask HN: Figure out the routes of LA Street Cleaners from ... by davidhegarty on Friday April 17, 2015 @12:16PM (#9395295)
Great. We have a blog post up: http://blog.fixed.com/post/116649853902/a-problem-we-need-he...

... I'll setup a GitHub later today.

Re:Ask HN: Figure out the routes of LA Street Cleaners from ... by davidhegarty on Friday April 17, 2015 @01:24PM (#9395781)
Re:Ask HN: Figure out the routes of LA Street Cleaners from ... by shortoncash on Thursday April 16, 2015 @10:26PM (#9391962)
I'm booked through August, unfortunately. It's an interesting problem, though.