Modelling the Total Score of an AFL Game

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Over the eight seasons from 2006 to 2013 an average AFL game produced about 185 points with a standard deviation of around 33 points. In about one quarter of the games the two teams between them could only muster about 165 points while in another one quarter they racked up 207 points or more.

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Modelling Team Scores as Weibull Distributions : Part II

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In a previous post I discussed the possibility of modelling AFL team scores as Weibull distributions, finding that there was no compelling empirical or other reason to discount the idea and promising to conduct further analyses to more directly assess the Weibull distribution's suitability for the task.

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Introducing ChiPS

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In years past, the MAFL Fund, Tipping and Prediction algorithms have undergone significant revision during the off-season, partly in reaction to their poor performances but partly also because of my fascination - some might call it obsession - with the empirical testing of new-to-me analytic and modelling techniques. Whilst that's been enjoyable for me, I imagine that it's made MAFL frustrating and difficult to follow at times.

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Set of Games Ratings: A Comparison With VSRS

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A few weeks back, Tony introduced the Very Simple Rating System (VSRS). It’s an ELO-style rating system applied to the teams in the AFL, designed so that the difference in the ratings between any pair of teams plus some home ground advantage (HGA) can be interpreted as the expected difference in scores for a game involving those two teams played at a neutral venue. Tony's explored a number of variants of the basic VSRS approach across a number of blogs, but I'll be focussing here on the version he created in that first blog.

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Estimating Home Ground Advantage by Venue

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In the previous blog I fitted models to the game margins of each team separately, seeking to explain the margin in any game in terms of the Venue at which the game was played and three "Excess" variables summarising from the designated home team's perspective its relative Venue Experience, MARS Rating and recent form.
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What's More Important: Who You Play or Where You Play Them?

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The benefits of playing at home have been extensively investigated both here on MAFL for Australian Rules football and more generally within the sports prediction community for this and other sports. Put simply, teams that play at home win more often and score more points than you'd otherwise expect them to after adjusting for the quality of the opponents they face.
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Revisiting Home Ground Advantage

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This week I've been part of a Twitter conversation about Home Ground Advantage in the AFL, a trending topic because of the shift from Football Park to Adelaide Oval for the home games of Adelaide and Port Adelaide in the 2014 season.
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The Relative Importance of Class and Form in AFL

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Today's blog is motivated by a number of things, the first of which is alluded to in the title: the quantitative exploration of the contributions that teams' underlying class or skill plays in their success in a given game relative to their more recent, more ephemeral form. Is, for example, a top-rated team that's been a little out of form recently more or less likely to beat a less-credentialled team that's been in exceptional form?
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Trialling The Super Smart Model

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The best way to trial a potential Fund algorithm, I'm beginning to appreciate, is to publish each week the forecasts that it makes. This forces me to work through the mechanics of how it would be used in practice and, importantly, to set down what restrictions should be applied to its wagering - for example should it, like most of the current Funds, only bet on Home Teams, and in which round of the season should it start wagering.
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Predicting Head-to-Head Market Prices

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In earlier blogs I've claimed that there's not much additional information in bookie prices that's useful for predicting victory margins than what can be derived from a statistical analysis of recent results and an understanding of game venues.
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What Do Bookies Know That We Don't?

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Bookies, I think MAFL has comprehensively shown, know a lot about football, but just how much more do they know than what you or I might glean from a careful review of each team's recent results and some other fairly basic knowledge about the venues at which games are played?
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