Are AFL Games Like Random Walks?
/I came across an interesting journal article this week, published in March of 2015 on arXiv.org and entitled "Safe Leads and Lead Changes in Competitive Team Sports".
Read MoreTeam Scoring Model Parameter Sensitivity
/In recent blogs we've being exploring a range of topics related to team scoring, all of them based on a model I created in a series of blogs
Read MoreA Few More Simulations: Losing With More Scoring Shots and Playing a Draw
/The last few blogs here on the Statistical Analyses part of the website have used a model of team scoring that I fitted late last year to explore features of game scores and outcomes that we might expect to observe if that model is a reasonable approximation of reality.
Read MoreThe Importance of Goal-Kicking Accuracy
/So far this season, eight teams have lost after generating more scoring shots than their opponents and three more have been defeated despite matching their opponent's scoring shot production, which means that the outcome of over 15% of games might this year have been reversed had the losing team kicked straighter.
Read MoreMapping Expected Margins to Probabililties
/I'm a sucker for a colourful chart, and today's is based on simulations using an earlier model of Home and Away team scoring, constrained by bookmaker-based empirical realities.
Read MoreSame Head-to-Head Prices, Different Lines
/I've raised an eyebrow or two more than once when I've seen the TAB bookmaker post two markets with the same head-to-head prices but different line market handicaps priced at even-money.
Read MoreAre Some Games Harder to Predict Than Others?
/If you've ever had to enter tips for an office competition where the the sole objective was to predict the winner of each game, you'll intuitively recognise that the winners of some games are inherently harder to predict than others.
Read MoreSuperMargin Implications? Yes, They Are Atrocious.
/In a recent blog I developed an empirical model of AFL scoring in which I assumed that the Scoring Shots generated by Home and Away teams could be modelled by a bivariate Negative Binomial and that the conversion of these shots into Goals could be modelled by Beta Binomials.
Read MoreWhy AFL Handicap-Adjusted Margins Are Normal : Part II
/In the previous blog on this topic I posited that the Scoring Shot production of a team could be modelled as a Poisson random variable with some predetermined mean, and that the conversion of these Scoring Shots into Goals could be modelled as a BetaBinomial with fixed conversion probability and theta (a spread parameter).
Read MoreWhy AFL Handicap-Adjusted Game Margins Are Normal
/This week, thanks to Amazon, who replaced my unreadable Kindle copy of David W Miller's Fitting Frequency Distributions: Philosophy and Practice with a dead-tree version that could easily be used as a weapon such is its heft (and assuming you had the strength to wield it), I've been reminded of the importance of motivating my distributional choices with a plausible narrative. It's not good enough, he contends, to find that, say, a Gamma Distribution fits your data set really well, you should be able to explain why it's an appropriate choice from first principles.
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 More
