The Importance of a Team's Recent Form: What Bookies (and MARS) Think
/When the TAB Sportsbet bookie is framing a market for an upcoming game, clearly one set of data that he uses is the recent results of the participating teams.
Read MoreSuper Smart is Taking Heed of Bookies
/Across a series of blogs now we've explored the Super Smart Model (SSM) and investigated its ability to predict victory margins. In this blog we'll look more closely at which variables most influence SSM's forecasts.
Read MoreTrialling The Super Smart Model
/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.
Read MoreSimplifying MARS Rating Updates: An Epilogue
/In my previous blog I used Eureqa to find a simpler version of the equations for updating MARS Ratings.
There I jumped straight to what I deemed the 'best' solution that Eureqa had found, glossing over a slew of perfectly adequate and much simpler solutions that it also found.
Read MoreMARS Ratings Revisited: There Must Be a Simpler Way
/It's official: Eureqa is an amazing tool.
With all the recent model-building I've been undertaking and writing up here in various blogs, I've become more aware of the predictive power of MARS Ratings.
Read MorePredicting Head-to-Head Market Prices
/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.
Read MoreThe Relationship Between Head-to-Head Price and Points Start
/I've found yet another MAFL-related use for the Eureqa tool, this time to determine the precise relationship between a team's head-to-head price and the start it's giving or receiving on line betting.
A simple plot of the history of a team's head-to-head price (or the probability that can be inferred from it) versus its start on line betting makes it obvious that there's a relationship between the two and that it's a non-linear one, but in the past I've been constrained by my own (lack of) ingenuity and persistence in generating sufficient possibilities to find its exact nature.
Read MoreBuilding The Super Smart Model
/In a previous blog we investigated the information content of bookie prices in the context of predicting the victory margin of a game.
Read MoreWhat Do Bookies Know That We Don't?
/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?
Read MoreIn-Running Wagering: What's the Best Strategy?
/With services such as Betfair now offering in-running wagering opportunities, the ability to accurately assess a team's chances of victory at any given point in a game is now of considerable commercial value.
Imagine, for example, that your team, who are at home, lead by 18 points at the first change. Would a wager on them at $1.40 be advised?
Read MoreIn-Running Prediction of the Winner of an AFL Game
/I've been planning to create this model for a while.
With it, you can calculate the probability that the home team will eventually prevail given the state of the match at a particular point in the game.
Read MoreLooking At Team Performance Quarter-By-Quarter
/AFL Football - as the cliche goes - is a game of four quarters. The benefit of this arrangement is that AFL scores provide twice as much information about the ebb and flow of each contest as the scores of any other form of football in this country.
With the quarter-by-quarter information alone we can perform some interesting analyses for every team.
Read MoreShould We Have Been Surprised About the Season So Far?
/Surprisals, you might recall, are a way of measuring the likelihood of the result of a chance outcome. They're measured in bits, and one bit of surprisal is the amount of surprise that you should feel in correctly predicting the toss of one unbiased coin.
Read MoreIs the Home Ground Advantage Disappearing?
/Home teams, as a whole, have not fared particularly well this season, which is one of the reasons that most of the MAFL Funds - all but one of which bet exclusively on home teams - have been testing Investors' patience.
Read MoreModelling AFL Team Scoring : Part III
/This is the third in a series of blogs (here are Part I and Part II) about modelling the scoring of AFL teams and, with the heavy statistical lifting out of the way, in this blog we can look at the practical uses of what we've discovered so far
Read MoreModelling AFL Team Scoring : Part II
/This is the second in a series of blogs about modelling the scoring of AFL teams.
In the previous blog on this topic I introduced what I called the Score Equation, which represents a way of thinking about a team's score in any game
Read MoreModelling AFL Team Scoring
/Today's blog is the first in a series that will look at statistically modelling the scoring behaviour of teams in the AFL.
If you're profoundly reductionist about it, you can think about a team's footy score as being the product of the number of scoring shots it creates and the proportion of those scoring shots that it converts into goals.
Read MoreGoalkicking Accuracy Across The Seasons
/Last weekend's goal-kicking was strikingly poor, as I commented in the previous blog, and this led me to wonder about the trends in kicking accuracy across football history.
Just about every sport I can think of has seen significant improvements in the techniques of those playing and this has generally led to improved performance. If that applies to football then we could reasonably expect to see higher levels of accuracy across time.
Read MoreScoring Shots: Not Just Another Statistic
/For a while now I've harboured a suspicion that teams that trail at a quarter's end but that have had more scoring shots than their opponent have a better chance of winning than teams that trail by a similar amount but that have had fewer scoring shots than their opponent.
Suspicions that are amenable to trial by data have a Constitutional right to their day in court, so let me take you through the evidence.
Read MoreProbability Scoring Methods
/In Sunday's blog I introduced the three probability scoring methods that I'll be using to evaluate the HELP model's predictive performance this season.
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