Estimation of Climbing Route Difficulty using Whole-History Rating

Abstract

Existing grading systems for rock climbing routes assign a difficulty grade to a route based on the opinions of a few people. An objective approach to estimating route difficulty on an interval scale was obtained by adapting the Whole-History Rating (WHR) system to rock climbing. WHR's model was fitted to a database of 236,095 ascents recorded by users on an established climbing website. 73% of the ascents used in the dataset were classified as successful. Predictions were on average 85% accurate with 10-fold cross-validation. The results suggest that an empirical rating system is accurate at assessing route difficulty and is viable for revising conventional route grades.