Posts filed under Sports statistics (1776)

Team Ratings for Round 25

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 25, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 176 matches played, 103 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 58.52%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 25

Here are the predictions for Round 25

Team Ratings for Round 24

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 24, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 168 matches played, 97 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 57.74%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 24

Here are the predictions for Round 24

Fascinating item in The Guardian, which looks at the Olympics from a data journalist’s point of view …. and does a great job.

Team Ratings for Round 23

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 23, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 160 matches played, 90 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 56.25%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 23

Here are the predictions for Round 23

Sammie Jia draws my attention to a story in Nature News about drug-testing for atheletes.  The story mentions the  impressive performance of swimmer Ye Shiwen in the women’s 400m individual medley, and suggests that tests should focus on atheletes who have unusually good performances or strong improvements.

I’m surprised this isn’t already being done.  There are at least three good arguments for it.  Firstly, if doping works, the rate will be higher among athletes who have improved dramatically, so more cheats will be found with lower testing costs.  Secondly, the successes of performance-enhancing drugs are the cases it’s most useful to catch, either if you think the point is deterrence in young atheletes or if you are doing it for some sort of abstract ideal of fair competition.  And finally, athletes who make dramatic performance gains honestly deserve to have any doubts removed.

In contrast to many other approaches to targeting tests, this one is very hard to game.  The whole point of doping is to get otherwise-impossible improvements in performance, so there isn’t any useful way to avoid attention. Targeting performance improvements would be even more efficient in circumstances where taking and storing samples is cheaper than analyzing them: it would be possible to store a larger collection of samples and retrospectively test performers who had done surprisingly well.   That, more or less, is how outcome-dependent sampling is used in medical research:  we take blood samples from everyone, but focus the expensive assays on people who, possibly decades later, stand out for good or bad health.

Team Ratings for Round 22

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 22, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 152 matches played, 86 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 56.58%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 22

Here are the predictions for Round 22.

Team Ratings for Week 24

Here are the team ratings prior to Week 24, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 124 matches played, 87 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 70.2%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Week 24

Here are the predictions for Week 24. The prediction is my estimated 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 21

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 21, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 144 matches played, 84 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 58.33%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 21

Here are the predictions for Round 21

Team Ratings for Week 23

Here are the team ratings prior to Week 23, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 122 matches played, 87 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 71.3%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Week 23

Here are the predictions for Week 23. The prediction is my estimated 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 20

Here are the team ratings prior to Round 20, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 136 matches played, 81 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 59.56%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 20

Here are the predictions for Round 20