Success at high peaks: a multiscale approach combining individual and expedition-wide factors

TL;DR

This study uses a multiscale network approach to analyze how individual traits and expedition-wide factors influence mountaineering success, revealing key predictors like experience, partner familiarity, and expedition size.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multiscale network framework combining individual and expedition-wide factors to better understand mountaineering success.

Findings

Repeat partners significantly increase success rates.

Youth and oxygen use are key success predictors.

Expedition size and length correlate with success.

Abstract

This work presents a network-based data-driven study of the combination of factors that contribute to success in mountaineering. It simultaneously examines the effects of individual factors such as age, gender, experience etc., as well as expedition-wide factors such as number of camps, ratio of sherpas to paying climbers etc. Specifically, it combines the two perspectives into a multiscale network, i.e., a network of individual climber features within each expedition at the finer scale, and an expedition similarity network on the coarser scale. The latter is represented as a multiplex network where layers encode different factors. The analysis reveals that chances of failure to summit due to fatigue, altitude or logistical problems, drastically reduce when climbing with repeat partners, especially for experienced climbers. Additionally, node-centrality indicates that individual traits of youth and oxygen use are the strongest drivers of success. Further, the learning of network projections enables computation of correlations between intra-expedition networks and corresponding expedition success rates. Of expedition-wide factors, the expedition size and length layers are found to be strongly correlated with success rate. Lastly, community detection on the expedition-similarity network reveals distinct communities where a difference in success rates naturally emerges amongst the communities.