Home always misplaced

Arc App Support
1

When I am home, arc always thinks I am at a Subway station 700m away. Always. Why?

And is there a way to register favourite places that get use as defaults once you are in their area?

2

Hi @Bjoern!

Arc learns each place based on previously confirmed visits. When it chooses the wrong place, that is usually caused by one of two things:

  1. It doesn’t yet have enough confirmed previous visits for the potential places, so it’s making a bad guess based on insufficient knowledge
  2. Or the incorrectly chosen place has some incorrectly assigned previous visits, that make it look like it’s a good match when really it isn’t

In this case it’s most likely the second problem: The subway station place has some confirmed visits assigned to it that were instead visits to your home. Those incorrect confirmations are making the subway station look like a good match when it isn’t.

To fix that you need to find the incorrectly assigned visits, and reassign them to the correct place (in this case your Home place). There’s a few ways to find those visits. First, find any visit to the subway station, tap into the details view for that visit, then scroll down to “Place details” and tap on that.

  • From the “Total visits” view:
    1. On the Place Details view, tap on “Total visits”
    2. As you scroll down the list the map will update to show you the currently visible visits, making it easier to spot which ones are in the wrong place
  • From the “Common durations” view:
    1. On the Place Details view, tap on “Common duration”
    2. Look for histogram bars that indicate an unlikely duration for that place. For example at a subway station you’re very unlikely to stay several hours, so any histogram bar for a long duration probably indicates incorrectly assigned visits
    3. Tap on the suspicious histogram bar, then at the bottom tap on “Visits”
    4. This takes you to filtered version of the “Total Visits” view - this time showing only visits that have a duration within that range
  • You can also use the “Common arrival” and “Common leaving” views in the same way, using the histograms / bar charts in those. Although in practice I find visit durations much easier to reason about than arrival and leaving times.

Once you’ve found an incorrectly assigned visit and tapped through to its Details View, tap “EDIT” and reassign it to the correct place. Which in this case is probably your Home place.

For each visit you correct, Arc will update its model of both your Home place and the subway station place. And then… problem fixed!