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  • 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.

    Screen Shot 2014-09-19 at 7.48.37 AM

     

  • Space Invaders

  • Analyzing the SuperContest

    statsbylopez's avatarStatsbyLopez

    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…

    View original post 323 more words

  • NFL Picks – Week 3

    Total –  SU: 32-16-0 (66.67%) ATS: 27-20-1 (57.29% +5 Units) O/U: 31-17-0 (64.58% +12.3 Units)

    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

    Tampa Bay at Atlanta

    Prediction: Falcons 24-20 (62.5%)

    Pick: Buccaneers +6.5 (55.8%)

    Total: Under 45

    San Francisco at Arizona

    Prediction: 49ers 22-20 (55.9%)

    Pick: Cardinals +3 (52.7%)

    Total: Under 42.5 

    San Diego at Buffalo

    Prediction: Bills 23-22 (51.8%)

    Pick: Chargers +2.5 (55.3%)

    Total: Over 44.5

    Tennessee at Cincinnati

    Prediction: Bengals 24-19 (64.5%)

    Pick: Titans +7 (55.1%)

    Total: Under 43.5 

    Baltimore at Cleveland

    Prediction: Ravens 22-21 (53.5%)

    Pick: Browns +2 (52.2%) PUSH

    Total: Over 42

    Green Bay at Detroit

    Prediction: Lions 25-24 (53.4%)

    Pick: Lions -1 (50.5%)

    Total: Under 52.5

    Indianapolis at Jacksonville

    Prediction: Colts 23-20 (57.4%)

     Pick: Jaguars +7 (62.3%)

    Total: Under 45.5 

    Kansas City at Miami

    Prediction: Dolphins 21-19 (55.9%)

    Pick: Chiefs +5 (58.2%)

    Total: Under 41.5

    Oakland at New England

    Prediction: Patriots 29-19 (77.2%)

    Pick: Raiders +14.5 (61.5%)

    Total: Over 47

    Minnesota at New Orleans

    Prediction: Saints 27-20 (68.3%)

    Pick: Vikings +9.5 (58.0%)

    Total: Under 51

    Houston at NY Giants

    Prediction: Giants 22-21 (51.1%)

    Pick: Giants +2.5 (58.2%)

    Total: Over 42

    Washington at Philadelphia

    Prediction: Eagles 25-22 (59.8%)

    Pick: Washington Football Team +6.5 (58.6%)

    Total: Under 50

    Denver at Seattle

    Prediction: Seahawks 24-22 (54.6%)

    Pick: Broncos +4.5 (58.2%)

    Total: Under 49

    Dallas at St. Louis

    Prediction: Cowboys 23-22 (53.0%)

    Pick: Rams +2 (52.7%)

    Total: Under 45.5

    Pittsburgh at Carolina

    Prediction: Panthers 23-20 (59.4%)

    Pick: Steelers +3.5 (50.5%)

    Total: Over 41.5

    Chicago at NY Jets

    Prediction: Bears 21-20

    Pick: Bears +2.5 (60.1%)

    Total: Under 45.5

  • 538 is six months old…where does it stand?

    statsbylopez's avatarStatsbyLopez

    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…

    View original post 1,199 more words

  • 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.

    markheckmann's avatar"R" you ready?

    Today I stumbled across a figure in an explanation on multiple factor analysis which contained pictograms.

    abdi_mfa

    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).

    View original post 411 more words

  • 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?

    statsbylopez's avatarStatsbyLopez

    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). 

    Margin

    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…

    View original post 572 more words

  • NFL Picks Week 1

    Week 1 – SU: 10-6-0 ATS: 8-8-0 O/U: 13-3-0

    Green Bay at Seattle

    Prediction: Seahawks 24-21 (57.9%)

    Pick: Packers +6 (59.1%)

    Total: Over 45

    New Orleans at Atlanta

    Prediction: New Orleans 25-24 (51.3%)

    Pick: Saints +1 (54.2%)

    Total: Under 52

    Buffalo at Chicago

    Prediction: Chicago 24-19 (64.3%)

    Pick: Bills +6.5 (53.9%)

    Total: Under 48.5

    Washington at Houston

    Prediction: Texans 24-20 (59.6%)

    Pick: Texans -2.5 (52.5%)

    Total: Under 45.5

    Tennessee at Kansas City

    Prediction: Chiefs 23-19 (61.0%)

    Pick: Titans +6 (55.9%)

    Total: Under 44

    New England at Miami

    Prediction: Patriots 26-22 (61.7%)

    Pick: Patriots -4 (50.5%)

    Total: Over 47

    Oakland at NY Jets

    Prediction: Jets 22-18 (59.2%)

    Pick: Raiders +5.5 (56.3%)

    Total: Over 39.5

    Jacksonville at Philadelphia

    Prediction: Eagles 28-18 (76.5%)

    Pick: Jaguars +11 (52.6%)

    Total: Under 52

    Cleveland at Pittsburgh

    Prediction: Pittsburgh 24-19 (64.6%)

    Pick: Browns +6 (52.2%)

    Total: Over 41

    Minnesota at St. Louis

    Prediction: Rams 22-20 (54.1%)

    Pick: Vikings +6 (62.8%)

    Total: Under 45

    Cincinnati at Baltimore

    Prediction: Ravens 22-20 (54.7%)

    Pick: Bengals +2.5 (52.4%)

    Total: Under 43.5

    San Francisco at Dallas

    Prediction: 49ers 22-21 (54.2%)

    Pick: Cowboys +5 (59.9%)

    Total: Under 49

    Carolina at Tampa Bay

    Prediction: Panthers 21-20 (53.8%)

    Pick: Buccaneers +2 (51.9%)

    Total: Over 40

    Indianapolis at Denver

    Prediction: Broncos 29-21 (71.4%)

    Pick: Broncos -7.5 (51.1%)

    Total: Under 55.5

    San Diego at Arizona

    Prediction: Chargers 22-21 (50.2%)

    Pick: Chargers +3.5 (59.6%)

    Total: Under 44.5

    NY Giants at Detroit

    Prediction: Lions 25-21 (60.2%)

    Pick: Giants +4 (51.1%)

    Total: Over 45.5