Issuer and country difficult index

Hello Numista members.

I expanded the work done in this topic:
https://en.numista.com/forum/topic89362.html

In order to answer the question of how difficult is to get a given issuer/country and create a ranking of difficulty of them, a study was prepared by crossing the data of all 129,910 collections registered with Numista, generalizing a study done in November 2019, but now with all site collections.
In order to do it, a program was developed that reads all open collections registered on the website, table their countries and issuers and a counter that adds up the number of collectors who owns coins from each country and issuers.

We can see that 58.1% of the opened collections have coins from 1 to 31 issuers. 85.3% of them have up to 124 issuers. 94.6% have up to 217 issuers and so on.
We can also verify that only 1.24% of the collections have more than 300 registered issuers (173 collections). This % drops to 0.14% above 400 issuers (30 collections) and to only 0.03% above 500 issuers (7 collections). Another conclusion is that 1,899 collections have coins from only one issuer (16.2% of the total).

Histogram of issuers by collection:



Histogram of countries by collection:



This is the main results for issuers:



This is the main results for countries:



A math function was created to calculate the issuer/country difficult index associating a number 1 to the easiest issuer/country, and 100 to the most difficult ones (with zero owners).

The detailed results can be found here:

Results

Due to the division of German notgelds into emitters, some differences can happen.

Best regards
Turi

Some results from countries by colors, from white (the easiest) to black (most difficult):

Amazing!
Thank you for this great job!

This post should be pinned

Fascinating results!

How did you manage to access the data of 129,910 collections?

Citeer: "numinis"​Fascinating results!
​
​How did you manage to access the data of 129,910 collections?

Thank you so much!

I made a program that reads each open collection of Numista,
one by one from the internet, and then read each issuer from the list and put the data in a spreadsheet.

The program needs about 10 hours to read 11.000 open collections.

I remember many years ago before the Issuers addition, that I was trying to get into the 300 country group, this was before I knew what I wanted to collect and I was basically getting anything I didn't have in my collection, specially those rare countries that you cannot find on the bins (10 for $1) or whatever you get at your local shops/markets...

Now that I know I am not pushing this anymore I might be able to help a couple of collectors to achieve it... I will try to see which are the ones that match your amazing table and put them up for Swap or sale in the next days, but I do know that I have at least 2 Cocos (Keeling) and a set of the seven caribbean islands (antigua, dominica, grenada, Montserrat, Saint Kits and Navis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent) and a Couple of the orange yellow countries listed above...

Feel free to contact me while I search and post those coins in the swaps and trade forum in the next days...

Happy Hunting.

I wanted to make it to 300 countries myself, but the issuers reorganization hit when I only had 293. I'm still hoping that some day there'd be like 320 countries and it will actually be possible to get 300 again (come on, why isn't the Seleucid Empire a country?), though the recent unifications in the Ancient area make it unlikely.

(Technically it's already theoretically possible to get 300, but a few of the harder countries are basically undoable without a lot of waiting and/or a $10000+ budget. IIRC there's a few where all the known examples of their coins sum up to like a dozen.)

Citeer: "January First-of-May"​I wanted to make it to 300 countries myself, but the issuers reorganization hit when I only had 293. I'm still hoping that some day there'd be like 320 countries and it will actually be possible to get 300 again (come on, why isn't the Seleucid Empire a country?), though the recent unifications in the Ancient area make it unlikely.
​

​I am collecting issuers instead of countries, much more fun

It looks like the old 300-country club had 24 members on Jan 1, 2017.

Using the new data, it looks like about 20 collections have 250 countries, so a 250-country club might be equivalent in difficulty to the old 300-country club.

What is the criteria for the definition of Issuer or Country?

We need a rule.

Wow! Thank you so much for such interesting statistics. I looked at it and will study more.

I wish it was possible to get internal access to the collection for statistic purposes as a lot of collectors make their collection private (including me).

I saw and was surprised that no one had coins from Gepid Kingdom, but I have. Then I realized that I was not a part of the study since my collection is private.

And I see that no one has more than 276 countries (or even less). It means that I am with my 275+1 countries (with a room to grow) is on the very top (which is kinda cool).

Anyways, thanks again! Well done!

Citeer: "Geison"​What is the criteria for the definition of Issuer or Country?
​
​We need a rule.

​
This is a very good question. It looks like that in same cases the "countries" and "issuers" are created and destroyed only based in personal opinion. A rule is very important.

Citeer: "iiruig"​Wow! Thank you so much for such interesting statistics. I looked at it and will study more.
​
​I wish it was possible to get internal access to the collection for statistic purposes as a lot of collectors make their collection private (including me).
​
​I saw and was surprised that no one had coins from Gepid Kingdom, but I have. Then I realized that I was not a part of the study since my collection is private.
​
​And I see that no one has more than 276 countries (or even less). It means that I am with my 275+1 countries (with a room to grow) is on the very top (which is kinda cool).
​
​Anyways, thanks again! Well done!

​​Yes. Your collection are not in the database. I am not able to use all the data, but Xavier could do it. Congrats. You are probably the biggest country collector.

Citeer: "phfoticus"​It looks like the old 300-country club had 24 members on Jan 1, 2017.
​
​Using the new data, it looks like about 20 collections have 250 countries, so a 250-country club might be equivalent in difficulty to the old 300-country club.

​Don't forget Turi's statistics only include visible collections., so there will be a lot more collections having 250 countries.
I also don't know if in this statistics members with x collections are counted as 1 collection per member or x collections per member. In the last case it will decrease the total amount of countries also.

Congratulations Turi, for this wonderful statistics. It's a pitty only visible collections are included but of course that's beyond your will.

For what it's worth, I definitely have over 300 pre-reorganization countries by now (having acquired many of the ones I was missing when I was at 293), but my current country count is 236.
(My current issuer count, on the other hand, is 358, though that includes about two dozen different German states.)

There's a lot more than 20 members with over 250 countries, but even pre-reorganization a lot of members who would have qualified for the 300 country club didn't actually bother to join it; it's probably hard to estimate now (especially as, IIRC, some of the pre-reorganization countries have since been merged into other issuers), but I suspect that the true equivalent number (to the extent that one exists) is in the 230s.

Citeer: "Turi"​Hello Numista members.
​
​I expanded the work done in this topic:
​https://en.numista.com/forum/topic89362.html
​
​In order to answer the question of how difficult is to get a given issuer/country and create a ranking of difficulty of them, a study was prepared by crossing the data of all 129,910 collections registered with Numista, generalizing a study done in November 2019, but now with all site collections.
​In order to do it, a program was developed that reads all open collections registered on the website, table their countries and issuers and a counter that adds up the number of collectors who owns coins from each country and issuers.
​
​We can see that 58.1% of the opened collections have coins from 1 to 31 issuers. 85.3% of them have up to 124 issuers. 94.6% have up to 217 issuers and so on.
​We can also verify that only 1.24% of the collections have more than 300 registered issuers (173 collections). This % drops to 0.14% above 400 issuers (30 collections) and to only 0.03% above 500 issuers (7 collections). Another conclusion is that 1,899 collections have coins from only one issuer (16.2% of the total).
​
​Histogram of issuers by collection:
​
​
​
​Histogram of countries by collection:
​
​
​
​This is the main results for issuers:
​
​
​
​This is the main results for countries:
​
​
​
​A math function was created to calculate the issuer/country difficult index associating a number 1 to the easiest issuer/country, and 100 to the most difficult ones (with zero owners).
​
​The detailed results can be found here:
​
​Results
​
​Due to the division of German notgelds into emitters, some differences can happen.
​
​Best regards
​Turi

​Wonderful work

Regards,
Pramod