Applications of Predictive Modeling on the Appalachian Trail (APMAT).
I presented the results of this project at the 2017 National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in Memphis Tennessee. This work was the focus of my senior capstone project for my Bachelors of Science in Computer Science degree. I created a web scraper, obtained, and cleaned 118,200 hiker trail journal entries. I then constructed an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model which issued a predictions indicating how far along the Appalachian Trail a hiker was expected to make it from a given starting location. Despite having no user provided GPS data, the final version of the model was able to obtain a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 3.65 miles-per-day.
The presentation I gave at NCUR 2017 is accessible here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1APsdBMWfqZmcbOu_HC0u3eJWXOd52GM2D5qVNd_4NeQ/edit?usp=sharing
A backup copy of this presentation is included in the repository in PDF format.