Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: The website Kaggle sponsored a March Machine Learning Mania contest over the last few months, which involved picking probabilities for every hypothetical NCAA 2014 tournament game. Points were awarded, or taken away, given how well each submissions’ probabilities fared, relative to everyone else in the pool (for my statistics-oriented readers, it used the loss function from…

Big news!  I have accepted an assistant professor position in the Department of Mathematics at Loyola University Chicago.  Everything is now official and me, my wife, and the dogs will be moving to Chicago in August. Cheers!

  I’ll be there on Friday.  Come check out my art! Cheers.

Im my regression class that I am teaching, we recently got to the topic of variable selection.  We covered the standard forward, backwards, and stepwise selection procedures, and I then went out of my way to caution them about using these procedures.  In trying to explain this to them, I believe that I have come…

What if I set up an organization that collected money for college basketball players and then paid them out when they left the NCAA.  It would work like this: An account is set up for each player in the NCAA. Fans can donate to a player or an entire team. Once a player leaves the…

From this article: However, Cukierski thinks that the use of big data has become too trendy. “The whole big data idea is really within a big hype cycle,” mainly driven by a particular software framework for dealing with information, called Hadoop. “It’s not that Hadoop isn’t useful,” Cukierski says, but when companies look to it…

  Well we’ve narrowed the gap to about 0.003, but I still don’t think we can possibly catch Grimp with one game left to go.  Out best bet for the money at this point is a disqualification for some reason.  Cheers.  

I introduced the Cinderella plot a few years ago, but I haven’t updated it for this year’s tournament until now.  (I’ve been busy with the job search, which was successful(!)….more to come on that….).  So without further delay, I present to you the Cinderella plot for all of the NCAA tournaments from 2002 through 2014:…

    With eleven games to play in the NCAA basketball tournament, we (me and @statsbylopez) find our team in second place in the March Madness Machine learning contest, a mere 0.00365 behind the leader Grimp Whelkin.  So, we’re 0.00365 away from $15K.     What’s really impressive though, is that both of our entries are doing…

Twitterer @brentonk alerted me to the following Grantland article written by the only man in the world to block me on Twitter, Bill Barnwell.  The following excerpt is from the article (emphasis added): It would also have some interesting effects on kicker value. In a way, it might seem like it should make kickers more valuable…