Posts filed under General (3156)

Team Ratings for Round 15

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 92 matches played, 60 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 65.2%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 15

Here are the predictions for Round 15. 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.

From the MetService warnings page

The ‘confidence’ levels are given numerically on the webpage as 1 in 5 for ‘Low’, 2 in 5 for ‘Moderate’ and 3 in 5 for ‘High’. I don’t know how well calibrated these are, but it’s a sensible way of indicating uncertainty.  I think the hand-drawn look of the map also helps emphasise the imprecision of forecasts.

(via Cate Macinnis-Ng on Twitter)

Team Ratings for Round 10

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 72 matches played, 38 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 52.8%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 10

Here are the predictions for Round 10. 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 14

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 86 matches played, 55 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 64%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 14

Here are the predictions for Round 14. 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.

• Rating systems are the popular way to scale ‘reputation’ statistically so it works for internet transactions between people who don’t know each other. Tom Slee has a couple of pieces (via Cosma Shalizi): Some Obvious Things About Internet Reputation Systems  and In praise of fake reviews:So the reviews that a restaurant owner believes are most likely to be fair are precisely the ones that Yelp judges to be untrustworthy….Unfortunately for restaurateurs, their opinions on trustworthy reviews are irrelevant. The company is not legally bound to be fair in its filtering and sorting activities,
• Another example of interesting results failing to replicate, this time from a popular TED talk about posture. As the post at Data Colada points out, this is a strong non-replication: it’s not just that they didn’t see they effect, they ruled out even much weaker effects. There’s a reason statisticians go on and on about over-interpretation of single, small studies.
  
• Looking at the Census data on religion, a map and set of stories from Lincoln Tan and Harkanwal Singh at the Herald

• A rather different form of data journalism, reported at Buzzfeed (or the original paper report here). The Telegraph had a ‘tactical voting tool’ that said who you should vote for if your goal was a Labour or Tory government.  It was mostly honest, despite the paper’s well-known preferences. However, as Buzzfeed’s headline says: “The Telegraph’s Tactical Voting Tool Was Coded To Never Recommend The SNP”

• From the LA Times, Wylie Burke on “Why whole-genome testing hurts more than it helps” (disclosure: I once co-supervised a student with Prof Burke)

• A Slate article by a lawyer says Wyoming has ‘criminalized citizen science’ by creating a law against collecting and reporting environmental data. Now, Wyoming has created crimes of “unlawful collection of resource data” and “trespassing to unlawfully collect resource data”, but I’m pretty sure the Slate article exaggerates them.  “Unlawful collection” can only happen on private land, which the article clearly gets wrong. “Trespassing to unlawfully collect” can happen on public land, but I’m not convinced that in the National Park example there isn’t the necessary authorisation to enter the land. Presumably the law does something or they wouldn’t have bothered passing it, and it’s probably something evil, but a better article would have been nice.

Stuff says:

There has been an alarming upward trend in the costs of similar treatments, as more drugs are developed and come on to the market, new Pharmac figures show.

I would argue that this is almost precisely not the problem. The story covers two important issues, but doesn’t distinguish them well.

The first issue is that many expensive new drugs aren’t very good. To get a drug approved for marketing you don’t need to show it’s better than the current stuff, and it often isn’t. Similar treatments might still be useful to have, if they give other options for people with side effects or have more convenient dosing, but they are often more expensive.

The United States is very bad at not using treatments that are similar (or worse) but more expensive, so these drugs are a problem there. Here, we’re quite good at not using them, so they don’t matter all that much. As long as Pharmac enjoys popular support and the media doesn’t buy into too many drug-industry publicity campaigns, we can ignore the expensive new drugs that aren’t worth the cost.

A second issue is that a subset of the expensive new drugs aren’t similar. The story quotes the price differences for ‘anthracycline’ (doxorubicin or epirubicin) and two newer breast cancer drugs, docetaxel and trastuzumab, as evidence of increases over the years.

Anthracyclines haven’t gone away. In fact, they’re quite a bit less expensive now than they were in 2002. The reason Pharmac now buys docetaxel and trastuzumab is that they’re worth the extra cost for at least some women. The existence of trastuzumab is not a problem for the healthcare system, it’s an opportunity.

There is a problem coming, though: many of the new drugs have names ending in ‘mab’.

Monoclonal antibodies, ‘mab’s, are one of the classes of ‘biologics’: big, complex molecules made by living cells. Making and testing generic versions of biologics (called ‘biosimilars‘) is much harder than running up off-brand doxorubicin. Even when the patents run out on the ‘mab’s and ‘ept’s, a competitive market might be a while in developing and prices will stay higher.  It’s not so much the expensive on-patent drugs that are a worrying change, it’s the prospect of expensive off-patent drugs in the future.

• Nate Silver Ben Lauderdale carefully examines how his predictions (and everyone else’s) were so staggeringly wrong in the UK election. More people should do this sort of thing.

• The Guardian had really good graphics

• So, in a different way, did Tom Katsumi
  
• There’s a US court case on whether FDA restrictions on ‘off-label’ drug advertising (ie, advertising a drug for uses it hasn’t been approved for) violates the 1st Amendment. There’s a definite chance the FDA will lose, which would strengthen the incentives to find new uses for drugs, but weaken the incentives to collect good evidence that the drug is actually effective for these uses.

• Just over half of Tindr users are single, but that’s ok because the company “never intended it to be a dating platform.” Maybe people are just using it for the articles.

• How lucky do you have to be for it to be evidence of insider trading? Especially when you consider what some traders will call a “once in 3 billion years” event. What isn’t mentioned here but is important is the idea of likelihood ratios: we’re not just looking at whether an event is unlikely, but whether it becomes much more likely under the alternative hypothesis that you’ve got an inside source.

• Player characters in role-playing games accept unreasonable risks:
  Someone, we’ll call that person the Game Master, wants you to accept a single D8 die roll, with death no resurrection on a 1. But as a sweetener, if you roll 2-8 you’ll get…something nice! What would the something nice have to be for you to agree to make that roll? 

• Another interesting interactive graphic of trends in US baby names.

• You know that recent Facebook research saying it’s your fault your news feed is biased? Only 4% of US Facebook users provided enough political affiliation information to be included, and you have to read not just the research paper but the ‘Supplementary Materials’ to find this out (or read Eszter Hargittai). And, not surprisingly, the research doesn’t say the algorithms don’t increase bias: what else would a good filter algorithm be doing other than filtering for what it thinks you will like?

Team Ratings for Round 13

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 80 matches played, 52 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 65%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 13

Here are the predictions for Round 13. 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.

• From the Guardian, in an otherwise-sensible piece talking about decreases in infant mortality “So things are getting better. The small wrinkly proto-Royal that just emerged from the national womb will have thrice the chance of surviving that her father and I did, just through the privilege of being born in 2015.” It’s pretty obvious this is wrong.  If you use the numbers in the previous paragraph, the change is from 98.9% to 99.6%, which isn’t a threefold increase.

• From Mashable: “Facebook turns the London Eye into big UK election pie chart”. Not only is it a pie chart, it’s a pie chart of Facebook mentions, positive or negative, for each party

•  Terry Burnham writes about a neat cognitive hack: using fonts that are too small, in order to make people concentrate and learn more. There’s even evidence that it works; it’s just there’s a whole lot more evidence that it doesn’t. Dramatic small-sample experimental findings really can be misleading, it isn’t just statisticians being gratuitously cynical
  

Team Ratings for Round 9

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 64 matches played, 30 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 46.9%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 9

Here are the predictions for Round 9. 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.