ABOUT
Welcome to Stats In The Wild
This is a blog about statistics and its applications in the real world (i.e. “the wild”). A lot of the content is about sports, though any topic related to statistics (i.e. everything) could potentially show up.
Who is in charge here?
Greg.
I came here to buy art. Where can I buy art?
You can buy art here. And thank you for supporting brilliant, paradigm shifting art.
Who is Greg?
I’m Greg. Dad. Husband. Professor. Statistician. Artist. Kaggle Champion. openWAR author. Improviser.
Currently, I’m an assistant professor of statistics in the department of mathematics and statistics at Loyola University Chicago where I started in 2014. (As of December 2016, I have not been fired.)
Before this, I was a post-doctoral research fellow in biostatistics in the School of Public Health at the University of Massachusetts. I graduated from the University of Connecticut with a Ph.D. in statistics in August 2011.
I grew up in western Massachusetts near the birthplace of basketball in a time when UMass actually had a relevant basketball team led by the likes of Donta Bright, Dana Dingle, and Lou Roe. During junior high, I attended every UMass home game with my father (except the St. Bonaventure game, which we always gave to my cousin as a Christmas present), which included a UMass victory over the Wake Forest Demon Deacons led by a young Tim Duncan.
After graduating from Cathedral high school in Springfield, MA, I attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). While there, I received my BS in Actuarial Science and continued on for an MS in applied statistics, where I completed my degree requirements by writing a thesis about NFL point spreads. I then worked for a few years at a major catalog company targeting marketing campaigns before returning to graduate school at the University of Connecticut where my dissertation topic was statistical disclosure control. While there, I collected Hasheem Thabeet’s homework one time, which I believe, in some small way, helped UConn win a national championship two years later. I regret my actions as a UMass basketball fan and would like to openly apologize to former UMass point guard and current UMass head coach Derek Kellogg.
I have been blogging here since my second year of graduate school in 2008.
For more details about me, you can view my CV.
Cheers.
Stats in the Wild 
you should edit this page so readers know who you are.
ok
You are fascinating. FYI.
Thank you?
Were you a TA for Business Stats for Corjero or something like that in Spring 2009.
That sounds about right.
using pro-football-ref is going to skew the results somewhat…. www. oldestlivingprofootball.com has the most accurate information available. There are hundreds and hundreds of errors that have been corrected by oldestlivingprofootball.com –
I assume this is in reference to my article in response to “Mere Mortals”? I’m sure there are mistakes in pro-football-reference.com, but my general point still stands that Barnwell’s “study design” is fundamentally flawed. The distributions of ages between the two groups is significantly different, and Barnwell should be looking at survival times rather than mortality rates. Both of those points still stand.
I agree it is flawed, but it is flawed for more than just that particular reason. How can you do a study using missing or flat out wrong birth/death info of hundreds and hundreds of players? The final result will not be accurate.