"Finding the rarity of each pokemon : a statistical analysis of 116k spawns, early results."

#PokemonGO: Heya travelers!I've been collecting data on around 800 spawn points for the last week. Today I decided to take a look at this data and start my analysis of spawn mechanics and pokemon rarity for my area.In this first post, We'll be looking at how I believe we can find the rarity of different pokemon by looking at a larger picture than the individual spawn chance for each pokemon.MethodologyI scanned around 800 spawn points for 6-7 days. I have 120 to 155 data points per spawn points, for a grand total of 116k data points. All this data was recorded in a SQLite database for further analysis.Then, for each spawn points, I made the tally for the total number of each pokemon that spawned on it. By dividing by the total number of each pokemon spawn by the total number of spawn for every spawnpoint, I found the % of chance that a specific pokemon will spawn on every spawn point.Altough the number of data points is too small for analysis on rare pokemon (for example, a lot of rarer pokemon only spawned once in 140 spawn opportunity), I believe this gives us enough data for an early analysis on common pokemon spawning. By gathering more data or by combining multiple databases, I believe we can find the relative rarity of every pokemon.Early resultsIn this first analysis, I decided to test my method by checking the spawn % of the 3 most common pokemon : pidgey, weedle and rattata.After finding the spawn % of these 3 pokemon for every spawn point, I then assigned each spawn point a number (starting from 1), and plotted the spawn % to this number (from highest spawn % to lowest, highest % being spawn #1, and so on), giving us 3 graphs showing the spawn % of around 750 spawns for these. I alsoHere is the graph for pidgey.Here is the graph for rattata.Here is the graph for weedle.As we can see, we the majority of spawn points for these 3 pokemon make them appears from 15 to 30% of the time, with very few spawn points being higher or lower. But more importantly, we see that all 3 graph seems to follow a trendline that is very similar. Let's put them together!Here is the graph showing that pidgey, rattata and weedle put together.The trendline is almost identical!ConclusionWith this data, I think we can conclude that the relative rarity of these 3 pokemon is the same.Hypothesis This brings me to an interesting hypothesis concerning spawn mechanics of each spawn points. The commonly accepted idea about spawn % is that each spawn type has a fixed % for each pokemon. For exemple, water spawns have X% chance to spawn magikarp, Y% chance to spawn staryu, Z% chance to spawn dratini and so on.After this early analysis, I think we can conclude that this is not how it works. Here's my hypothesis :Each pokemon is assigned a rarity tier.Each tier has a range on the spawn %, with some % being more heavily weighted (as seen from the graphs).When spawn tables are created/updated, each table is generated from a set number of possible pokemonThen, each pokemon is assigned a spawn % from the range of it's tier.Future workAfter collecting more data, I will re-do the analysis on these 3 pokemon, to see if the trendline is still the same. I will also analyze water spawns (found around 50 that I am scanning). I will also analyze the spawn % of less common pokemon (spearow, eevee, drowsee, etc).Thanks for your time! via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2bNPGrE