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…

Originally posted on "R" you ready?: 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…

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%)…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: 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…

Here is a quote I liked from the blog post “Statistics: Losing Ground to CS, Losing Image Among Students”: (Recently I was pleased to discover–“learn,” if you must–that the famous book by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman complains about what they call “hype” over neural networks; sadly, theirs is a rare voice on this matter.) Cheers.…

This is the first of the blog posts in my “backblog” pertaining to #jsm2014.   My dissertation work was in statistical disclosure control and the post-doc work was in genetics.  Almost immediately after starting my post-doc, I realized that privacy issues and genetic data seem to go hand in hand.  (I recently submitted and R21…

Originally posted on Exploring Baseball Data with R: Over at Stats In the Wild, my collaborator Greg Matthews has been monitoring the results of openWAR for the current season. How is he doing this? The first step, of course, is to load the openWAR package. require(openWAR) Getting the 2014 Data Now we need some data.…

The 2014 NFL season is almost here.  That means it’s time for my NFL preview  (2013 NFL Season Preview).  I’ve updated and tweaked my model this year so it’s hopefully better than last year. Below you can read my predictions for the 2014 season. Or if you just want to see the numbers and skip…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: Two of the most interesting sessions – at least as judged by twitter interest – at the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings in Boston were the player tracking session (abstracts here) and the hockey analytics panel (here). Here’s a brief summary, with some relevant tweets. A) First, some links Here’s the .mp3 of…