It's always hard to answer these questions without first asking "Why?" The approach that makes the most sense depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Nevertheless, here's some basic advice. First, if you don't know anything about filtering, you should probably pick up some basics. I did a web search on exponentially weighted moving average and the first site on the list looked quite good: Dealing with Measurement Noise (A Gentle Introduction to Noise Filtering) M.T. Tham, http://lorien.ncl.ac.uk/ming/filter/filter.htm Second, you have time measured two different ways (D=number of days ago and G=number of games ago). It seems simplest just to add the two numbers together T=D+G. So a performance 5 days ago and 2 games ago would give you a value of T=7. Perhaps you might want to weight things differently. In the case of weekly sporting events, T=D/7+G might make more sense. There's a lot of arbitrariness in your choices for the relative importance of D vs G and how quickly the weights decay to zero. Unless your results were used for something very critical like litigation or salary negotiations, I wouldn't waste a lot of time trying to compare different approaches. Most reasonable approaches will come up with roughly the same answer. Steve Simon, [EMAIL PROTECTED], Standard Disclaimer. The STATS web page has moved to http://www.childrens-mercy.org/stats. . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
