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My completely uninformed guide to March Madness and some thoughts on my kaggle entry
I submitted my March Madness Machine Learning Mania today. My two entries consist of picks made using the actual spread for first round games and then a simple Bradley-Terry model for the games past that. In my second bracket, which I called the “aggressive” one, I picks UConn in the men’s bracket and South Carolina in the women’s bracket to win each round (and thus the tournament) with probability 1. So is UConn and South Carolina win, maybe I have a shot at winning. I also manually adjusted two teams on the women’s side (South Carolina and USC). The problem with South Carolina is that they haven’t lost any games and Bradley-Terry basically can’t handle that. I adjusted their regression coefficients to match the market price that they win the tournament. I also adjusted USC on the women’s side because they were way off their market price too. I didn’t make any adjustments to the men’s side because the futures prices were generally in the ball park with what I was estimating (i.e. there are three truly top teams in the men’s bracket (Purdue, UConn, Houston), then a sizable gap down to the next team (which I think is Iowa State. North Carolina got a gift of a 1 seed.)
I’m really excited about the new scoring system for Kaggle this year. And I think they got the scoring system right. A few weeks ago I believe I read that the scoring system was going to be average bracket score with traditional bracket scoring (1-2-4-8-16-32). My first thought when I saw this was that the best strategy is to just enter one bracket and hope. I think other people figured this out and they change it to a Brier score metric. But what they really got right this year is that that don’t take the average over all the GAMES, they take the average over the 6 ROUNDS. This weights the game in the finals much more heavily than a game in the first round, much closer to traditional bracket games.
Anyway, here are some probabilities below are based on my 10000 brackets that I submitted:
To win the championship:
UConn – 29.3%
Houston – 20.9%
Purdue – 19.4%
Iowa St – 5.19%
North Carolina – 4.96%
Tennessee – 3.39%
Marquette – 2.49%
Auburn – 1.94%
Illinois – 1.51%
Baylor – 1.43%
Everyone else < 1%
To make the finals:
UConn – 45.5%
Houston – 34.8%
Purdue – 32.4%
North Carolina – 12.6%
Iowa St – 11.4%
Tennessee – 7..92%
Marquette – 6.51%
Auburn – 5.8%
Illinois – 4.54%
Baylor – 4.34%
Arizona – 3.16%
Alabama – 2.68%
South Carolina – 2.46%
Kansas – 2.31%
Kentucky – 2.13%
Creighton 2.03%
Everyone else < 2%
And finally, here are my pre-tournament rankings 1 through UMass:
Rank | TeamName |
1 | Connecticut |
2 | Houston |
3 | Purdue |
4 | Iowa St |
5 | North Carolina |
6 | Tennessee |
7 | Auburn |
8 | Marquette |
9 | Illinois |
10 | South Carolina |
11 | Baylor |
12 | Kansas |
13 | Utah St |
14 | Creighton |
15 | Arizona |
16 | Duke |
17 | Nevada |
18 | Kentucky |
19 | Alabama |
20 | San Diego St |
21 | BYU |
22 | Florida |
23 | Texas Tech |
24 | New Mexico |
25 | Wisconsin |
26 | Gonzaga |
27 | Nebraska |
28 | Colorado St |
29 | Dayton |
30 | Clemson |
31 | Virginia |
32 | Mississippi St |
33 | Boise St |
34 | Texas |
35 | St Mary’s CA |
36 | TCU |
37 | Drake |
38 | Oklahoma |
39 | Grand Canyon |
40 | Northwestern |
41 | Colorado |
42 | Texas A&M |
43 | Washington St |
44 | Indiana St |
45 | Pittsburgh |
46 | NC State |
47 | FL Atlantic |
48 | Syracuse |
49 | Providence |
50 | Michigan St |
51 | Oregon |
52 | St John’s |
53 | James Madison |
54 | Seton Hall |
55 | Mississippi |
56 | Kansas St |
57 | Ohio St |
58 | Indiana |
59 | Princeton |
60 | Wake Forest |
61 | Cincinnati |
62 | Iowa |
63 | Butler |
64 | Virginia Tech |
65 | Villanova |
66 | Samford |
67 | Richmond |
68 | Duquesne |
69 | McNeese St |
70 | Utah |
71 | Memphis |
72 | Loyola-Chicago |
73 | South Florida |
74 | UNLV |
75 | Florida St |
76 | Boston College |
77 | Xavier |
78 | UCF |
79 | LSU |
80 | Georgia |
81 | VCU |
82 | Minnesota |
83 | UAB |
84 | Washington |
85 | Bradley |
86 | San Francisco |
87 | Appalachian St |
88 | Arkansas |
89 | Rutgers |
90 | Cornell |
91 | Vermont |
92 | Miami FL |
93 | Col Charleston |
94 | Maryland |
95 | Penn St |
96 | Georgia Tech |
97 | St Joseph’s PA |
98 | Yale |
99 | USC |
100 | UC Irvine |
101 | St Bonaventure |
102 | Santa Clara |
103 | George Mason |
104 | Massachusetts |