Category Archives: Uncategorized
Super Bowl Squares
I received an email this morning from a friend: “Is there any sort of a statistical breakdown for which are the best numbers to have in a Super Bowl squares pool (for entertainment purposes only)?”
Now, if my friend were going to use this information to gamble, it would be highly unethical. However, since he clearly stated that it was for “entertainment purposes only,” I feel that I can conduct a study with a clear conscience.
If he had wanted to gamble on it, here is a quick explanation of how that usually takes place. (According to that website: “Basically, if you are at a party where you don’t have betting squares you are a Communist.”)
Anyway, using data from football-reference.com I created a ten by ten frequency table (using R, of course) of exactly how many times each outcome has occurred in the history of the NFL. You can find the graph here.
Somethings to note:
- 2-2 is the worst square by far. It’s only happened 5 times in the history of the league. The fair odds for this square are over 2800-to-1.
- The best squares are, no surprise, 7-0 and 0-7, occurring 581 and 577 times, respectively.
- The other great squares to have are in order, 0-3, 0-4, 4-7, and 7-4. All of these have occurred over 480 times each.
- These 6 outcomes (7-0, 0-7, 0-3, 0-4, 4-7, and 7-4) account for almost 23% of all the NFL games ever played.
Cheers.
Rule for Variance Inflation Factors
A quote from here:
“Goldberger (1991) notes that while the number of pages in econometrics
texts devoted to the problem of multi-collinearity in multiple regression is
large the same books have little to say about sample size. Goldberger states:
“Perhaps that imbalance is attributable to the lack of an exotic polysyllabic
name for ‘small sample size.’ If so, we can remove that impediment by introducing the term micronumerosity” (Goldberger, 1991: 248–249).”
Cheers.
NFL Rankings – After Week 17
Rankings updated as of 1/1/2012; Records updated as of 1/1/2012; CHFF rankings as of 12/28/2011
AFC NFC
Playoff team
Division Champ
Eliminated from Playoffs
| Team | Rank | Change | Record | CHFF Rank |
| New England | 1 | – | 13-3 | 3 |
| Pittsburgh | 2 | ↑ | 12-4 | 1 |
| Green Bay | 3 | ↓ | 15-1 | 6 |
| Baltimore | 4 | – | 12-4 | 5 |
| Atlanta | 5 | – | 10-6 | 11 |
| 6 | ↑ | 8-8 | 2 | |
| New Orleans | 7 | ↓ | 13-3 | 15 |
| 8 | – | 8-8 | 23 | |
| Detroit | 9 | ↑↑ | 10-6 | 10 |
| San Francisco | 10 | – | 13-3 | 4 |
| NY Giants | 11 | ↓↓ | 9-7 | 8 |
| 12 | – | 8-8 | 12 | |
| 13 | – | 8-8 | 18 | |
| 14 | ↑ | 4-12 | 14 | |
| 15 | ↑↑ | 7-9 | 30 | |
| 16 | ↑↑↑↑ | 7-9 | 9 | |
| 17 | ↓↓↓ | 8-8 | 26 | |
| Cincinnati | 18 | ↓↓ | 9-7 | 22 |
| 19 | ↑↑ | 8-8 | 7 | |
| 20 | ↑↑ | 9-7 | 19 | |
| 21 | ↓↓↓ | 6-10 | 13 | |
| Houston | 22 | ↓↓↓ | 10-6 | 20 |
| 23 | – | 6-10 | 24 | |
| 24 | ↑ | 2-14 | 16 | |
| Denver | 25 | ↓ | 8-8 | 30 |
| 26 | ↑↑↑↑ | 5-11 | 28 | |
| 27 | ↓ | 3-13 | 27 | |
| 28 | ↓ | 4-12 | 21 | |
| 29 | ↓ | 8-8 | 29 | |
| 30 | ↓ | 5-11 | 25 | |
| 31 | – | 6-10 | 17 | |
| 32 | – | 2-14 | 32 |
BCS: My offer still stands…….if you want to contact me you can send me a tweet @StatsInTheWild.
Cheers.
Yates and significance tests
I was reading the newest issue of Significance Magazine last night, and I came across this quote in a letter that someone had written to the magazine:
The emphasis given to formal tests of significance throughout [R.A. Fisher’s] Statistical Methods…has caused scientific research workers to pay undue attention to the results of the tests of significance they perform on their data, particularly data derived from experiments, and too little to the estimates of the magnitude of the effects they are investigating.” … “The emphasis on tests of significance and the consideration of the results of each experiment in isolation, have had the unfortunate consequence that scientific workers have often regarded the execution of a test of significance on an experiment as the ultimate objective. (Yates 1951)
I feel like this is extremely relevant today where it seems that the only thing anyone ever cares about in studies is the p-value and whether or not it is less than the mythical 0.05 cut-off. But what strikes me most about this quote is that it was written sixty years ago in 1951.
Cheers.
Statisticians are special because…..
From Andrew Gelman’s Blog: “P.S. Statisticians are special because, deep in our bones, we know about uncertainty. Economists know about incentives, physicists know about reality, movers can fit big things in the elevator on the first try, evolutionary psychologists know how to get their names in the newspaper, lawyers know you should never never never talk to the cops, and statisticians know about uncertainty. Of that, I’m sure.”
Slate and Statistics
Here are two interesting articles related to statistics that were featured on Slate.com two Mondays ago:
The first article, by Kevin Gold, is called “The Leaky Nature of Online Privacy: Network analysis can uncover your personal details even if you choose to hide them.” This led me to LaTanya Sweeney’s webpage (of k-anonymity fame), which I then spent quite a bit of time reading. (I found the work on face de-identification to be very interesting.)
On that same day on Slate, everyone’s favorite former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer (If you haven’t seen “Client 9” yet, stop what you are doing and watch it) had an article called “World Defeats U.S. in Four Sets: How the decline of American men’s tennis can explain global economics.” In the article, Spitzer discusses the difference between correlation and causation as it relates to tennis and the economy.
Cheers.
Google auto-complete and Slate
Recently, I posted (“Multidimensional Scaling, Republican Presidential Candidates, and ‘a douchebag” and “Tracking the Republican candidates via google auto-complete“) about Google auto-complete and potential Republican presidential candidates. Slate.com posted a good piece called “Google’s GOP Search Suggestion” (a day after my original post, I should note) where they look at the auto-complete for candidates names using a Google image search rather than a straight Google search.
Stats in the Wild 
