Actual Trail Status conditions can be found at https://coramtb.org/trails and are kept accurate and up to date by your hardworking local trail stewards.
Looking for the CORA Trail Status Classifier? That can be found here.
Want to see more of the background on this project? Check out my full blog post here.
Predictions: Likelihood Trails to be Open by Day
Note: Currently, predictions aim to forecast the trail status for the end of the day. For example, if trails are closed in the morning but open later, the prediction will lean towards OPEN
Precipitation (inches) Report
Note: this includes both PAST and FUTURE precipitation. FUTURE precipitation expectations are color coded by likelihood of the rainfall occurring.
Project Overview
- What am I looking at here?
- The above visuals are Cincinnati Mountain Biking trail condition predictions built off of historical trail status & weather data, recent weather activity, and forecasted future weather activity.
- The predictions are individual for each trail, as each trail has different drying abilities, exposure to sunlight, and soil composition.
- Each prediction is trying to predict what the last trail status update will be on each date
- For example, if Devou is open in the morning but closed at night (before midnight), then the model will pay attention to the 2nd trail status of the day (and vice versa)
- Providing time of day predictions could get rather complicated (e.g. Devou will be open at 9am but closed at 1pm)
- The full project can be viewed on GitHub at this link.
- Why would I use this?
- I built this as a side project because I found myself often thinking about my mountain biking plans a few days ahead of time, but trying to make mental calculations as to if the trails were likely to be open that day based off of (1) The Trail Itself, how fast it drys (2) Recent weather activity and (3) Expected weather activity.
- If planning a ride with friends or a CORA Group Ride, this could be a useful way to try and anticipate if the trails will be ready for your group.
- This should NOT be considered a replacement to the actual trail status updates provided by your local stewards. These are simply predictions and are prone to error (e.g. weather forecast could be wrong, past historical data point could have confused the model, sparse weather activity on only the East/West side of Cincinnati). Your local stewards will help you make the best same-day decisions for riding.
- How was this built?
- This was built using ~3 years of historical CORA Trail Status updates and Cincinnati weather data provided by NOAA. To get recent and future weather data, OpenWeatherMap API is used.
- The modeling approach here was to train an XGBoost model for each individual trail (all trails have their own model), RandomizedSearch optimized on roc_auc, with the XGB model being optimized on logloss.
- For a less technical explanation, an XGBoost model is like a series of decision trees working together, where each tree makes a simple decision based on the data, and their combined decisions lead to a more accurate prediction.