The empirical world is almost always more complex than the theoretical one, which makes life more interesting but statistical modelling more difficult. As I've noted before, swings and roundabouts ...
Read MoreA simple question: how bad can a team have been in the previous season and still harbour realistic hopes of playing in the current season's Grand Final?
Read MoreAs the 2016 AFL season proper looms and the window for more leisurely analyses slowly closes, today we'll wander across the expanse of footy history this time using MoSSBODS Team Ratings to decide which of the 1,442 teams that have played VFL/AFL football have been the big improvers, and which the big decliners (well ... you find an antonym then).
Read MoreIn the previous post here on the Statistical Analyses blog we revisited the topic of Scoring Shot conversion and found that it appears to be unpredictable at a team level across entire seasons. That result, coupled with an earlier one where we found conversion rates to be unpredictable for a given team in a given game (and with some conversations I've had on Twitter subsequent to the more-recent analysis) makes it hard to reject the null hypothesis that team conversion rates are generated in a manner that's indistinguishable from a random variable.
Read MoreThe topic of team conversion rates - the proportion of Scoring Shots that teams convert into goals - and their predictability has come up before here on MoS.
Read MoreRichard McElreath, in one of the lectures from his Statistical Rethinking course on YouTube aptly and amusingly notes that (and I'm paraphrasing) models are prone to get excited by exposure to data and one of our jobs as statistical modellers is to ensure that this excitability doesn't lead to problems such as overfitting.
Read MoreThe 2016 AFL Draw, released in late October, once again sees teams playing only 22 of the 34 games required for an all-plays-all, home-and-away competition. In determining which 12 games - 6 at home and 6 away - a given team will miss, the League has in the interests of what it calls "on-field equity" applied a 'weighted rule', which is a mechanism for reducing the average disparity in ability between opponents, using the final ladder positions of 2015 as the measure of that ability.
Read MoreRecently, we've looked at the history of margins, of blowouts, mismatches and upsets, and the history of conversion rates. Today we'll be looking at the history of close games, which I'll define as games that are decided by a goal or less.
Read MoreIn the previous blog we reviewed the Conversion Rate history of the VFL/AFL competition looking, in turn, at how it has varied across eras for different venues and for different teams. That blog provides some useful context for this one and you might find it helpful to review it before proceeding.
Read MoreThe off-season always seems a good time for adopting a more sweeping historical perspective in the analyses here on MatterOfStats. Today we're going to be reviewing Scoring Shot Conversion rates across the 119 seasons of the VFL/AFL from both a venue and a team perspective.
Read MoreIt's been a while since we've reviewed the history of game margins and, in today's blog, we'll consider that history from a number of perspectives.
Read MoreIn the previous post we saw that large or what might be called "blowout" victories in AFL games occurred at a rate much higher than the rate at which bookmakers assigned equally large handicaps to those same games, and we saw why this might be the case from a theoretical perspective on the assumption that AFL game margins were Normally distributed.
Read MoreLast night I was thinking about the results we found in the previous blog post about upsets and mismatches and wondered if the historical pattern of expected game margins was borne out in the actual results. On analysing the data I found that there were a lot more victories of 10 Scoring Shots or more in magnitude than MoSSBODS had predicted. In most seasons, at least one-third of the games finished with a victory margin equivalent to 10 Scoring Shots or more, which was usually two or three times as many as MoSSBODS had predicted.
Read MoreThe idea for this blog came in an e-mail from long-time Friend of MoS, Michael, who wondered if the absence of lengthy winning streaks by teams like Hawthorn in 2015 reflected some feature of the game of Australian Rules or of the AFL competition that rendered such streaks self-limiting in length.
Read MoreIn the previous post here I introduced MoSSBODS 2.0, a Team Rating System design to provide separate Offensive and Defensive Ratings for teams in the VFL/AFL. Today I want to explore the relationship between teams' Ratings and their on-field success.
Read MoreEarlier this year in this blog, I introduced the MoSSBODS Team Rating System, an ELO-style system that provides separate estimates of each team's offensive and defensive abilities, as well as a combined estimate formed from their sum. That blog post describes the main motivations for a MoSSBODS-like approach, which I'll not repeat here.
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