Take Charge of your Destiny!
In this data story I’ll be showing you how a self guided machine learning algorithm can select the best Pokemon squad for the Hoenn region.
At the end of this data story you’ll have
six Pokemon to look out for in Pokemon GO
, as well as understand why the Bagon Community Day was the best to date!
As seen in the generation 2 games, the generation 3 games brought a wave of changes, especially the data structure.
Listed below are what I feel to be some of the major changes which effect the data of Hoenn region Pokemon.
| Main Features added from Generation 2: |
| A complete overhaul of the Pokemon data structure: |
| Individual personality value |
| Abilities and Nature |
| The IV system went from 0-15 to 0-31 |
| Damage such as Poison, Burn and Leach Seed (passive damage) are resolved at the end of the turn instead of immediately) |
| 135 new Pokemon introduced |
| 103 new moves were introduced |
| Weather can now be found on the field and activate at the start of a battle |
| Double Battles |
I’d like to call out double battles, as one of the main ingredients in my Pokemon evaluation soup is : Experience Growth Rate.
Double battles allow for more and quicker experience.
In other words all Pokemon can gain more experience earlier on in the game.
If you recall when I looked at the data of the Johto Pokemon, we introduced to the very strong bugs.
Now in the Hoenn region we are introduced to weaker bugs.
This was done to counteract the impact of Heracross and Shuckle.
Catch these bugs below for the pokedex completion but you’re not going to have them on your main team.
So these weak bugs aside you do get one of (if not the most) powerful dragons: Salamence. If you play Pokemon Go, you most likely took advantage of in my opinion the best Pokemon Go Community Day to date (Held on 4/13/2019).
One of my favorite sayings and motto is “Stay away from the brand names.” What does this mean and how does it apply to Pokemon? It means don’t buy into popular opinion, let the facts and data support your choices.
What’s all you hear about on community days? If you screamed “shinys” then yes… that’s all you hear about. How many shinys did you catch?
What’s your highest CP shiny? I’ll trade for shinys. Don’t be distracted by the brand name of community day, go for more than shinys. Play in area with several poke stops and has cover from weather.
During the Bagon community day you should have been catching every Bagon spawn
, not only clicking in to see if it’s shiny. Salamence is the goal, you want to be the mother of dragons (yes, I’m hype for Game of Thrones).
Sticking to the theme of “Stay Away from Brand Names”, applying a k-means clustering algorithm will look for trends in the data and give us a group of Elite Pokemon we should replay Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire with and keep an eye out for in Pokemon Go.
How do we get to the ideal Pokemon team? Applying a self guided machine learning approach: K-means clustering. Now you can’t jump ahead and run the algorithm against your data. First step is standardize your data, because you want to give each of your attributes an equal weight.
Take for instance:
I want a well balanced team, I don’t want a team elite on attack but weak on defense.
After the data standardize and I run the k-means algorithm, you can see the scatter plot above. The top right and far right cluster is the segment I want to build my team out of. All other segments, you can win with but you can 100% steam roll the competition.
Below I’ve included visual representation of the top attackers and defenders in each cluster.
This is great, love info graphics… but what do we do this knowledge? Well we can build a team.
Your team building begins from the very beginning.
I’ll cut to the chase… you should chose Torchic (sorry Swampert fans)
Why Torchic? Well I’m concerned about team structure and most importantly a showdown with Slaking (Fighting moves are must). Below you can see the full recommendation of what your final team should look like. You should also target all of these in Pokemon GO.
