Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: Last Spring, Loyola statistics professor Greg Matthews and I won the March Machine Learning Mania contest run by Kaggle, which involved submitting game probabilities for every possible contest in the 2014 NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Recently, we co-wrote a paper that motivates and summarizes the prediction model that we used. In addition to describing our…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: Just passing along a quick note from the world of academia; I, along with my adviser from Brown, Dr. Roee Gutman, published our first paper together. It’s titled ‘Estimating the average treatment effects of nutritional label use using subclassification with regression adjustment,‘ and presents a case study of how to measure…

My top 2 remain the same this week, but they’ve flipped spots.  I’ve got Oregon moving up to number 1 and Alabama dropping to 2.  Mississippi State and UCLA both fall out of my top 4 after losses to Ole Miss and Stanford, respectively.  TCU moves up to 3, mostly because of losses ahead of them,…

Total (weeks 1-13) – SU: 132-59-1 ATS: 96-94-2 O/U: 99-91-2  Week 1 – SU: 9-7-0 ATS: 8-8-0 O/U: 13-3-0 Week 2 – SU: 10-6-0 ATS: 10-6-0 O/U: 10-6-0 Week 3 – SU: 12-4-0 ATS: 9-6-1  O/U: 8-8-0 Week 4 – SU: 7-6-0 ATS: 5-7-1  O/U: 5-8-0 Week 5 – SU: 14-2-0 ATS: 6-9-0  O/U: 9-6-0 Week 6…

Some questions: Let’s say Alabama goes to the SEC championship game and loses.  Does that knock out Alabama and keep Miss State in (assuming they beat Ole Miss in the Egg Bowl)? If Missouri somehow wins the SEC, they have to get in to the playoff right?  Who would get knocked out then? I feel…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: I’m always impressed with the contest and accessibility of the Baseball with R website (here), which features a great cast of statisticians writing about everything from Hall of Fame entry to umpire bias. In a similar vein, I highly recommend Sam and AC’s nhlscrapr package in R. I’ve used it extensively to…

Total (weeks 1-12) – SU: 121-54-1 ATS: 88-86-2  O/U: 92-82-2  Week 1 – SU: 9-7-0 ATS: 8-8-0 O/U: 13-3-0 Week 2 – SU: 10-6-0 ATS: 10-6-0 O/U: 10-6-0 Week 3 – SU: 12-4-0 ATS: 9-6-1  O/U: 8-8-0 Week 4 – SU: 7-6-0 ATS: 5-7-1  O/U: 5-8-0 Week 5 – SU: 14-2-0 ATS: 6-9-0  O/U: 9-6-0 Week 6…

I read the article “Political Hack, Medical Quack” today about Glenn Beck and his medical problems and “treatment”.  You should read the whole thing, but there were a few quotes that I really liked.  This: Yale neurologist and noted quackery hawk Steven Novella sums the situation up nicely: “Chiropractic neurology appears to me to be the very…

Massey collects a bunch of different college football rankings.  Below I’ve plotted the mean of these rankings on the x-axis and the standard deviation on the y-axis.  There is very little variability among the rankings for the teams at the very top and very bottom.  But in the middle, the variability is much larger.  The…

Assume that all 4 NFC South teams lose their remaining non-divisional games.  Then Tampa Bay wins both of their remaining divisional games over Carolina and New Orleans and finish 4-12.  Then Carolina beats New Orleans and Atlanta and finishes 5-10-1.  Then it doesn’t matter who wins the remaining Atlanta-New Orleans game, the Panthers would win…