In 82nd after 32 games.  In 101st after 40 games.  Not a great day for us.  Need something big tomorrow to get within striking distance.  I’m guessing we will finish in the top 50, but it looks like our lucky run of three top 4 finishes in a row is pretty much over. Here are…

@statsbylopez and I finished the first day of March Machine Learning Madness in 140th.  After 32 games we are currently in 82nd. Here are our predicted probabilities for today’s games (with ridiculous precision): Villanova over Wisconsin: 0.7490162 Florida over Virginia: 0.5047416 Gonzaga over Northwestern: 0.896185 West Virginia over Notre Dame: 0.6114829 Florida State over Xavier:  0.7793296 Arizona over St. Mary’s (CA): 0.5626207…

Here is my bracket based entirely on my rankings using betting market data: Midwest Nothing too interesting here.  I’ve got all of the higher seeds winning all the games except for two first round upsets.  I like Oklahoma State over Michigan and Rhode Island over Creighton. South I’ve got three first round upsets in this bracket,…

If I chose the NCAA Tournament, here is what the field would look like: (*automatic qualifier) Actual Tournament Qualifiers 1 seeds: North Carolina, Villanova*, Gonzaga*, Duke* 2 seeds:Kansas, UCLA, Kentucky*, Louisville 3 seeds: Virginia, West Virginia, Oregon, Florida St.   4 seeds: Baylor, Wisconsin, Arizona*, Purdue 5 seeds: Florida, Wichita St.*, Notre Dame, Butler 6…

Well the brackets are out and I just finished filling my first one out.  Tomorrow and Tuesday I’ll work on my models for March Machine Learning Mania 2017. Here are some of my initial thoughts: I think the committee did a really good job picking 1 seeds this year.  I would have made Duke a 1…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: As in the moments following the 2016 US election, win probabilities took center stage in public discourse after New England’s comeback victory in the Super Bowl over Atlanta. Unfortunately, not everyone was enamored. https://twitter.com/PeteAbe/status/828460709109436416 While it’s tempting to deride conclusions like Pete’s, it’s also too easy of a way out. And, to be honest,  I share a small piece…

Predicted field Conference Champ (Actual or predicted) – BOLD 1 seeds: N. Carolina (ACC), Gonzaga (WCC), Villanova (Big East), Kansas (Big 12)  2 seeds: Kentucky (SEC), Duke, West Virginia, UCLA (Pac-12) 3 seeds: Louisville, Virginia, Oregon, Florida St. 4 seeds: Wisconsin (Big Ten), Baylor, Florida, Arizona 5 seeds: Purdue, Wichita St. (MVC), Butler, Notre Dame…

FloWrestling posted a breakdown of the national qualifiers by state.  So made some maps.  The first map displays the raw number of wrestlers per state.  With 49 qualifiers Pennsylvania leads the way, with Ohio and Illinois next (both 31) followed by New Jersey (30).  If you look instead at qualifying wrestlers per capita (in this…

Originally posted on God plays dice: The Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics program has what it calls an “Interesting Test” that interested students are invited to take as part of their application. Their web page offers a sample of past test problems. One of these, under the heading “Problems which at first seem to…

Originally posted on What's new: The self-chosen remit of my blog is “Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics”.  Of the 774 posts on this blog, I estimate that about 99% of the posts indeed relate to mathematics, mathematicians, or the administration of this mathematical blog, and…