Posts filed under General (3152)

Team Ratings for Finals Week 2

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 196 matches played, 122 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 62.2%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Finals Week 2

Here are the predictions for Finals Week 2. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 5

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 30 matches played, 19 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 63.3%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 5

Here are the predictions for Round 5. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 5

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Note that Cheetahs2 refers the Cheetahs team when there is a Pro14 match. The assumption is that the team playing in the Pro14 is the top team and the Currie Cup team is essentially a second team.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 11 matches played, 9 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 81.8%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 5

Here are the predictions for Round 5. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Ben Goldacre on Twitter, about a “heart age test” that “has so far told eight in ten people that they are at higher risk of serious illness because their heart is prematurely aged.”

“that’s either a fumbled implementation turning coefficients into automated patient advice; or it’s a radical new NHS screening programme announced, oddly, only to individual members of the public, one by one, through an app”

Screening is always easy to sell, so it’s useful to remember a sound-bite: “Screening is the opposite of treatment: you come in healthy and go out sick”

Team Ratings for Finals Week 1

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 192 matches played, 119 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 62%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Finals Week 1

Here are the predictions for Finals Week 1. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 4

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 22 matches played, 14 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 63.6%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 4

Here are the predictions for Round 4. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 4

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.
Note that Cheetahs2 refers the Cheetahs team when there is a Pro14 match. The assumption is that the team playing in the Pro14 is the top team and the Currie Cup team is essentially a second team.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 8 matches played, 6 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 75%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 4

Here are the predictions for Round 4. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Business confidence surveys are in the news recently.  I thought it might be useful to look at why anyone even does them.

Obviously, there’s no great social interest in making businesses happy and confident. Businesses are people only as a legal fiction. And even the business-related confidence of business owners and executives isn’t an obvious target — if it impacts something that matters, such as GDP or employment, we’ll see it there, and if it doesn’t, well then.

What makes countries around the world measure business confidence is that it’s thought to be a leading indicator.  That’s a slightly unfortunate phrase; we don’t mean it in the “very good indicator, we have the best indicators” sense. “Leading indicator” is less metaphorical than that: it means something that goes up and down earlier than the real economy does, and so helps with economic forecasting.

It’s plausible that business confidence could be useful this way.  Your boss knows if you’re going to be laid off before you do. A business owner has more idea than anyone else whether she’ll respond to a drop in sales by cutting production or expanding marketing.  If we could extract this information from a representative sample of businesses, it should help predict the economic future. Business confidence figures also have the advantage of timeliness: it takes a lot longer to get unemployment or GDP data collected and published.

On the other hand, business owners and managers have opinions as well as knowledge. Part of ‘business confidence’ will reflect the general political reckons of business owners and managers, both their overall feeling about the party in power and their views on bike lanes or the Americas Cup. That part of business opinion isn’t likely to help with forecasting.

Whether a business confidence survey will be economically useful is an empirical question, to be answered by data. It’s likely to help if the survey has questions designed to measure plans and intentions rather than feelings, and it’s likely to help if there’s a well-defined business population and a representative sample of it. The United Nations Statistics Division has written a book on how and why to conduct business confidence surveys and other ‘economic tendency surveys’, with chapters on questionnaire design, sampling frame, weighting, and other nerdy issues. If you feel like running one, you should maybe read it.

• There’s been a lot of coverage of a recent paper claiming ‘no safe level’ of drinking.  The best rebuttal is probably this one from David Spiegelhalter.
• Harvard Business Review published “Want Less Biased Decisions? Use Algorithms”. There’s a rebuttal at fast.ai pointing out that the initial argument misses a lot of the scaling-up harms of algorithms.
• Mark Hanna looks at Official Information Act reporting delays

Team Ratings for Round 25

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 184 matches played, 112 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 60.9%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 25

Here are the predictions for Round 25. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.