Category Archives: Uncategorized
NFL Picks – Week 4
Total (weeks 1-3) – SU: 39-22-0 ATS: 32-27-2 O/U: 36-25-0
Week 1 – SU: 10-6-0 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
NY Giants at Washington
Prediction: Washington Football Team 23-21 (55.4%)
Pick: Giants +3.5 (54.6%)
Total: Under 46.5
Carolina at Baltimore
Prediction: Ravens 23-20 (56.4%)
Pick: Panthers +3 (51.2%)
Total: Over 41
Green Bay at Chicago
Prediction: Bears 23-22 (52.9%)
Pick: Bears +1.5 (57.1%)
Total: Under 50.5
Buffalo at Houston
Prediction: Texans 24-19 (63.3%)
Pick: Texans -3 (55.0%)
Total: Over 41.5
Tennessee at Indianapolis
Prediction: Colts 24-21 (57.7%)
Pick: Titans +7.5 (63.4%)
Total: Under 46
Atlanta at Minnesota
Prediction: Falcons 23-22 (53.3%)
Pick: Vikings +3 (55.2%)
Total: Under 47
Detroit at NY Jets
Prediction: Lions 22-21 (52.5%)
Pick: Jets +2 (53.15%)
Total: Under 45
Miami at Oakland
Prediction: Dolphins 21-20 (52.6%)
Pick: Raiders +4 (58.8%)
Total: Over 40.5
Tampa Bay at Pittsburgh
Prediction: Steelers 23-18 (52.9%)
Pick: Buccaneers +7.5 (57.2%)
Total: Under 45.5
Jacksonville at San Diego
Prediction: Chargers 26-17 (73.8%)
Pick: Jaguars +13.5 (62.9%)
Total: Under 45
Philadelphia at San Francisco
Prediction: 49ers 25-20 (63.3%)
Pick: Eagles +5 (50.7%) PUSH
Total: Under 51
New Orleans at Dallas
Prediction: Saints 26-25 (51.5%)
Pick: Cowboys +3 (57.0%)
Total: Under 53.5
New England at Kansas City
Prediction: Patriots 25-21 (60.5%)
Pick: Patriots -3.5 (50.6%)
Total: Over 46
How the 538 model works
Here’s a explanation by Nate Silver of how his Senate prediction model works. 10,000 words, and denser than the typical FiveThirtyEight post, but it’s food for thought if you’ve been curious about what’s going on under the hood of FiveThirtyEight’s flagship product.
Make sure to click through to the footnotes – lots of links to subsidiary analyses from the past that explicate some of the interesting tidbits Silver and co. have built up over time.
Confusing Scotland pie chart
In the graphic below (from this article), the orange represent Scotland and the gray represents the United Kingdom. So in the result bar this make sense: 55% voted for Scotland to be independent and 45% voted to stay in the United Kingdom.
For population and GDP, I think this also makes sense. For instance, the United Kingdom has a population of 64.1 million and Scotland has a mere 5.3 million.
The map of the UK get’s a little bit more confusing. The way this is colored Scotland is clearly the orange here, but it looks like to United Kingdom is only the gray part when, in fact, the UK is both the gray and the orange. I would have made Scotland orange and gray striped to indicate that Scotland is both Scotland AND part of the UK.
Finally, the pie chart. This is a puzzle to me. I’m not really sure what they are trying to say here. Maybe I’m missing something, but it looks like what this is saying is that Scotland, who has a small fraction of the total population of the United Kingdom has a full 97% of the eligible voters and the United Kingdom has only 3%. That’s clearly not true. So what is that pie chart trying to say exactly? I really have no idea. (Please let me know if you know what it is trying to say. I really have no idea.)
But no matter what the answer is, can’t we all agree we shouldn’t be using pie charts at all?
Cheers.
Analyzing the SuperContest
This fall, the Westgate Las Vegas Hotel Casino is hosting the prestigious SuperContest, in which entrants pony up $1500 to pick 5 games a week against the spread. At season’s end, standings are judged by which entrants have the highest number of correctly picked games.
Last year’s winner was David Frohardt-Lane, who took home about $550k for first place. Perhaps not surprisingly, Frohardt-Lane is a statistician!
One of the neat aspects about the SuperContest is that the picks of all 1,403 of the 2014 entrants are posted immediately after the games begin (here). Even better, the data is fairly clean and easy to play with (at least so far).
That said, there are some very intriguing and potentially difficult questions to answer from a statistical perspective: How to account for the fact that people only pick 5 games per week? What about bye weeks? Do entrants pick each week seemingly…
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538 is six months old…where does it stand?
Wednesday marks the six-month anniversary of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight launch with ESPN.
As the site mixes statistics, sports, data visualization, and academic research, it’s been a must-read on nearly a daily basis for me.
Here’s my unsolicited and slightly ambiguous view of where things stand:
It’s really, really hard to do what FiveThirtyEight is trying to do and to do it well.
Here’s why:
FiveThirtyEight’s business model is primarily based on advertising, and advertisers generally don’t flock to sites that only spit out content once a week. As a result, Silver and colleagues are forced to put out articles at a frenetic pace. As one example, I estimated that FiveThirtyEight wrote 2.5 articles per day covering the 2014 World Cup, posts which were generally written by only one or two full time writers. That’s an incredible pace.
But here’s the catch; while the judging of a data journalism website should be based on content alone, and…
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A friend’s thoughts on the NFL
Really at the tipping point with the NFL you guys. It’s a complete blood sport played by barbarians with fake rules that protect no one and make the game less interesting. Never mind the media coverage which treats every story like a reading of The War of the Worlds.- Mike Christman
Well when you put it like that, I guess I’ll have to stop watching the NFL. On the other hand, SPORTS!
Cheers.
Using colorized PNG pictograms in R base plots
Awesome.
Today I stumbled across a figure in an explanation on multiple factor analysis which contained pictograms.
Figure 1 from Abdi & Valentin (2007), p. 8.
I wanted to reproduce a similar figure in R using pictograms and additionally color them e.g. by group membership . I have almost no knowledge about image processing, so I tried out several methods of how to achieve what I want. The first thing I did was read in an PNG file and look at the data structure. The package png allows to read in PNG files. Note that all of the below may not work on Windows machines, as it does not support semi-transparency (see ?readPNG).
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NFL Picks – Week 2
Total – SU: 20-12-0 ATS: 18-14-0 O/U: 23-9-0
Week 1 – SU: 10-6-0 ATS: 8-8-0 O/U: 13-3-0
Week 2 – SU: 10-6-0 ATS: 10-6-0 O/U: 10-6-0
Pittsburgh at Baltimore
Prediction: Ravens 23-21 (56.3%)
Pick: Steelers +2.5 (50.8%)
Total: Under 44.5
Miami at Buffalo
Prediction: Bills 22-20 (55.0%)
Pick: Bills +1 (57.8%)
Total: Under 43
Detroit at Carolina
Prediction: Panthers 24-22 (55.1%)
Pick: Lions +2.5 (52.0%)
Total: Over 44
Atlanta at Cincinnati
Prediction: Bengals 25-22 (56.4%)
Pick: Falcons +5.5 (57.8%)
Total: Under 48.5
New Orleans at Cleveland
Prediction: Saints 26-23 (59.3%)
Pick: Browns +6.5 (59.1%)
Total: Over 48
New England at Minnesota
Prediction: Patriots 26-23 (58.8%)
Pick: Vikings +3.5 (51.1%)
Total: Over 49
Arizona at NY Giants
Prediction: Giants 22-19 (57.6%)
Pick: Giants +2 (63.1%)
Total: Under 43.5
Dallas at Tennessee
Prediction: Titans 23-22 (51.7%)
Pick: Cowboys +3.5 (58.3%)
Total: Under 49
Jacksonville at Washington
Prediction: Washington Football Team 25-18 (71.1%)
Pick: Washington Football Team -5.5 (56.5%)
Total: Under 43.5
Seattle at San Diego
Prediction: Seahawks 23-21 (55.4%)
Pick: Chargers +6 (61.5%)
Total: Under 45
St. Louis at Tampa Bay
Prediction: Buccaneers 22-19 (58.3%)
Pick: Rams +5.5 (57.2%)
Total: Over 37
Kansas City at Denver
Prediction: Broncos 27-19 (70.9%)
Pick: Chiefs +13.5 ( 66.1%)
Total: Under 52
NY Jets at Green Bay
Prediction: Packers 25-18 (66.9%)
Pick: NY Jets +8.5 (56.8%)
Total: Under 46
Houston at Oakland
Prediction: Texans 22-20 (57.0%)
Pick: Oakland +3 (51.5%)
Total: Over 39.5
Chicago at San Francisco
Prediction: 49ers 24-19 (63.0%)
Pick: Bears +7 (56.7%)
Total: Under 48.5
Philadelphia at Indianapolis
Prediction: Eagles 24-23 (51.5%)
Pick: Eagles +3 (57.0%)
Total: Under 54
The B1G had a bad Saturday. How bad was it?
The conference formally known as the Big 10 seemingly had one of the worst weekends it could imagine, with most of its football teams either losing on the national stage or struggling against in contests versus perceived lower level opponents.
So how bad was the B1G’s day?
To start, the 13 teams playing (Indiana was off) finished 2-11 against the Las Vegas point spread, with several teams falling well short of the game’s closing number.
Here’s a dot-chart of how each team did, relative to game point spreads. For example, Nebraska, which was favored by 35.5 points over McNeese State but only won by 7, had the conference’s worst day relative to the point spread expectation (-28.5).
On the whole, a conference finishing 2-11 ATS is bad; due to chance, and assuming each game’s ATS result is a coin flip, a sample of 13 games would only produce 2 wins or fewer about…
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Stats in the Wild 