Forecasts and betting
The StatsChat rugby predictions are pretty good, but not different enough from general educated opinion that you could make serious money betting with them.
By contrast, there’s a professor of political science who has an election forecasting model with a 97+% chance that Trump will be president if he is the Republican nominee.
If you were in the UK or NZ, and you actually believed this predicted probability, you could go to PaddyPower.com and bet at 9/4 on Trump winning and at 3/1 on Rubio being the nominee. If you bet $3x on Trump and hedge with $1x on Rubio, you’ll almost certainly get your money back if Trump isn’t the nominee, and the prediction says you’ll have a 97% chance of more than doubling your money if he is.
Since I’m not betting like that, you can deduce I think the 97% chance is wildly inflated.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »