Visualising Team Scores
/It's a cliche, sure, but sometimes a picture (or two) does paint a thousand words.
Read More2012 - Winners Continue to Lead, and Leaders Win
/At the end of its Round 20 the 2012 season remains notable not just for the predictability of game outcomes but also for the relatively infrequency with which teams that have lead by more than a few points have ultimately relinquished that lead.
Read MoreExpected Surprisals
/If the TAB Bookmaker is any sort of a judge (and, speaking from painful experience, he is) then this week's results, Round 17 of season 2012, hold as much information about the competition as almost any round this season.
Read MoreTeam Scores - Statistical Distribution and Dependence
/In the most recent post on the Simulations blog I assumed that Home Team and Away Team scores were independently and Normally distributed (about their conditional means). I'll investigate both these assumptions in this blog.
Read MoreEstimating Fair Head-to-Head Prices : Part II
/In the previous blog on this topic I described a way to estimate the vig embedded in the head-to-head prices of both teams
Read MoreEstimating Fair Head-to-Head Prices : Part I
/You'll recall that the total overround embedded in the head-to-head market, ignoring the possibility of a draw, is calculated by summing the reciprocal of the head-to-head prices for each team. So, for example, if the head-to-head prices for a game were $1.20 / $4.60, the overround would be 1/1.2 + 1/4.6, which is 105.1%. Some subtract 1 from this figure and would report this overround as 5.1%.
Read More1897 to 2011 : Winners v Losers - Leads, Scoring Shots and Conversion
/In the previous blog, among other things we analysed which quarter winning teams win.
We might also ask about winnng teams, in what proportion of games do they trail at the end of a particular quarter, and how has this proportion tracked over the seasons.
Read More1897 to 2011 : Goals, Behinds, Scoring Accuracy & Winning Team Results By Quarter
/We've looked before at the topic of which quarter winning teams win. Today, first up, we'll revisit this issue in more depth.
Read MorePredicting the TAB Sportsbet Margin
/We've shown previously that it's possible to predict the TAB Sportsbet Bookmaker's head-to-head prices to a high level of accuracy using only MARS Ratings, the Interstate Status of a game and information about the very recent form of the Home team.
Read MoreSurprisals and Probability Scores
/Each week, at round's end, when I comment on the Probability Predictors I find myself stuck for a unit to attach to their performance.
Read MorePredicting the Final SuperMargin Bucket In-Running
/On Friday night, while watching the progress of the Saints v Freo game knowing that Investors has a SuperMargin wager on the Saints to win by 20-29, I was wondering how to react to the changes in the scoreline as the game progressed. Should I want the Saints to lead early? By a little? By a lot? By about 5 points at Quarter Time and 10 points at Half Time?
Read MoreThe Increased Importance of Predicting Away Team Scores
/In an earlier blog we found that the score of the Home team carried more information about the final game margin than did the score of the Away team. One way of interpreting this fact is that, given the choice between improving your prediction of the Home team score or your prediction of the Away team score, you should opt for the former if your goal is to predict the final game margin.
While that's true, it turns out that it's less true now than it once was.
Read MoreFinding Non-Linear Relationships Between AFL Variables : Alternative Measures to MIC
/The Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC) that we explored in the previous blog is not the only non-linear measure of the pairwise relationship between any two continuous variables.
Read MoreFinding Non-Linear Relationships Between AFL Variables : The MINER Package
/It's easy enough to determine whether or not one continuous variable has a linear relationship with another, and how strong that relationship is, by calculating the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient for the two variables. A value near +1 for this coefficient indicates a strong, positive linear relationship between the variables in question, so that high values of one tend to coincide with high values of the other, and vice versa for low values; a value near -1 indicates a strong, negative linear relationship; and a value of 0 indicates a lack of any linear relationship at all.
But what if we want to assess more generally if there's a relationship between two variables, linear or otherwise, and we don't know the exact form that this relationship takes? That's the purpose for which the Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC) was created, and recently made available in an R package called MINER.
Read MorePicking the High-Scoring Game
/Here's a simple question: what are the characteristics of games that tend to produce the highest aggregate scores?
Read MorePredicting the Final Margin In-Running (and Does Momentum Exist)?
/Just a short post tonight while we wait for the serious footy to begin.
For this blog I've again called upon the services of Formulize, this time to find for me equations that predict the final victory margin for the Home team (which might be negative or zero) purely as a function of the scores at the various quarter breaks.
Read MoreOptimising the Wager: Yet More Custom Metrics in Formulize
/As the poets Galdston, Waldman & Lind penned for the songstress Vanessa Williams: "sometimes the very thing you're looking for, is the one thing you can't see" (now try to get that song out of your head for the next few hours ...)
Read MorePredictors Behaving Badly: Intransitivity Revisited
/If I told you that I prefer green to blue, and blue to red, you'd probably assert that, logically, I should prefer green to red. In technical terms you'd be demanding that my colour preferences exhibit the property known as transitivity - one of the axioms of expected utility theory.
Read MoreWhat's Easier - Predicting the Home or the Away Team Score?
/Consider the following scenario. You're offered a bet in which you can choose to predict the final score of the Home or of the Away team and your adversary is then required to predict the final score of the other team.
Read MoreSetting an Initial Rating for GWS
/Last season I set Gold Coast's initial MARS Rating to the all-team average of 1,000 and they reeled off 70 point or greater losses in each of their first three outings, making a mockery of that Rating. Keen to avoid repeating the mistake with GWS this year, I've been mulling over my analytic options.
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