I was wondering if anyone had any idea how to solve this problem.
So basically I have a dataset where some person approximately comes at some regular interval and I don't know what that interval is. I need to determine if the person comes in at approximately regular intervals, not necessarily what is the specifically value of the interval. For example if a certain person comes to my house to deliver milk over some period on say
Week 1: Mon, Wed, Fri,
Week 2:Mon, Wed, Fri
Week 3:Mon, Thu, Fri
Week 4:Mon, Wed, Fri
Week 5:Mon, Wed, Fri
Week 6:Mon, Wed, Fri
Week 7:Mon, Wed, Fri
Week 8:Mon, Thu, Fri
So as we can see out of these 8 weeks only in 2 weeks the person didn't come on Wednesday and instead came on Thursday which can be attributed to maybe a holiday the day before. So the solution to this example is that the person does follow a regular pattern.
Similarly this is another example. Say the person came on -
Mon, Thu, Sun, Wed, Sat, Tue, Fri, Mon, Wed, Sun
where this person follows a regular pattern because except for the last Wednesday he comes every fourth day.
This is an example of where a person doesn't follow a pattern, say the person came on
Mon, Wed, Sat, Fri, Thu, Fri, Wed, Fri, Sun, Sun, Sat
I have to do this for hundreds of different people.
Another equivalent problem is if I know which days over a certain period of time (say a month) some person arrives I need to determine if they follow some pattern or not
I thought about trying to fit the data into a sinusoidal curve but I'm not sure if it will work when I have a person who comes every say Mon, Tue, Fri or the 7th of every month or the first and third monday of every month etc.
I'm open to any method as long as it has good accuracy. Also, depending on whichever algorithm you think is best, if possible could you share a link to some code which solves a similar problem so I can get a general idea of how I'm supposed to implement my algorithm. I'm pretty new to machine learning / data science. Thank You!