How would the model know the side of the road to search on? Is that information in the data or in your understanding of the sensor? My suggestion was to remove the side from the pymc model entirely and just consider position along the road since you have a lot of unnecessary variables in your model from that perspective. If all the sensor can do is sense count and the orientation of the sensor doesn’t matter, I don’t really see how you could better the prediction BUT I may not understand exactly what you’re asking.
Thinking a bit further:
- If the sensor had one sensitivity on one side and another on the back, I could see how you could learn something about what side of the the source is on. Especially if you drove down the road in both directions.
- If the strength of the counts varied enough when you drove on one side of the road vs. the other just due to that change in distance I could also see how you could also estimate the source placement
In either case, I don’t know enough about how these sensors work to be able to answer that.
Sorry if I’m being obtuse!