Amelia Greenhall on Using Moving Averages for Maintenance

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

We’ve posted some great talks by Amelia Greenhall here on the blog and we’re excited to bring you another insightful presentation. Last year Amelia gave a wonderful talk about her weight loss journey and the power of using running averages. In this updated talk Amelia gives a more in-depth look about how using a 10-day moving average serves as an “early warning system” that puts helps put her back on the path of mindful eating. Filmed at the QS Silicon Valley meetup group

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10 Responses to Amelia Greenhall on Using Moving Averages for Maintenance

  1. Daniel Reeves says:
    February 25, 2013 at 10:18 am

    This is similar to what The Hacker’s Diet recommends. (Which is also what Beeminder does.)

    Reply
  2. spg says:
    February 25, 2013 at 9:11 pm

    Fascinating! I have been using a 14 day rolling average to track around 24 different items including weight, body fat percent, blood glucose levels & blood pressure.

    Reply
  3. Gary Isaac Wolf says:
    February 26, 2013 at 12:05 pm

    One of the things I really liked here was Amelia’s comment that sometimes a line that doesn’t change is interesting and useful, too. What she means, in this case, I think, is that at the right scale and with the right transformation (in this case a simple moving average), what might have look like “noisy” or “random” or “static” data becomes coherent and meaningful.

    Reply
  4. Tucker says:
    February 27, 2013 at 4:18 pm

    Very interesting discussion. While the use of any moving average period (10, 14) can be beneficial for a number of reasons, I personally believe the period of choice should have some significance in terms of ones cyclical behavior since the resulting calculation shows the typical value/trend for that period. This is why I use a 7-day simple moving average…so much of our lives are based around a weekly cycle and the resulting value tells me how my behavior has progressed over the last week. One could also argue that a monthly average is relevant in this regard, yet I’ve found that ~30-day averages introduce to much lag to be useful.

    Reply
    • Amelia Greenhall says:
      March 6, 2013 at 9:48 pm

      The Hacker’s Diet (where I got the idea from) makes a pretty conscious choice to use a 10 day average (see the Signal and Noise chapter in the section “Simple moving averages”, but also gets into exponentially smothing averages, which you could use to reduce the lag for a long period. I think the difference between 7 and 10 is mostly that 10 removes more of the jagged up and downs. Maybe I’ll recalculate my data later and see what the differences in the lines are.

      Reply
      • Tucker says:
        March 7, 2013 at 6:48 am

        Sorry, I missed the description of the reasoning behind the 10EMA, my 10 mo. old daughter must have pulled me away from my screen during that portion! A 10EMA is similar to a 7SMA in that it responds more to recent prices, making it less laggy that a 10SMA.

        Reply

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