Posts from March 2020 (16)

Team Ratings for Round 14

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 89 matches played, 69 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 77.5%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 14

Here are the predictions for Round 14. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 1

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Predictions for Round 1

Here are the predictions for Round 1. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

From the Herald (and from the front page in the squashed-trees edition)

I’m not disputing the basic message that people being stabbed is bad and we’d like less of it.  And it’s good that numbers are being given, but there’s at least three issues with those numbers.  On top of the familiar “quote a total over four years because it’s bigger”.

The first is that the numbers don’t refer exclusively to “Aucklanders”.  As the story says

But a spokeswoman noted it was a regional 24/7 trauma centre for patients around Auckland and Northland, meaning many of the most serious trauma cases were directed to Auckland Hospital.

And secondly, the definition of ‘stabbing injury’ varies by DHB: Auckland DHB was reporting only stab wounds from assaults and self-harm, but

Counties Manukau chief executive Fepulea’i Margie Apa said the DHB’s figures included all stabbing injuries from any cause, “not only those from violence”.

Are there many cases of accidental stabbings? Well, we regularly get told about carving-knife accidents at Christmas, and about ‘avocado hand’, so there are some, but it’s hard to guess how many.  If you were doing this seriously, you’d come up with a list of relevant ICD-10 categories and ask the DHBs for numbers in those categories, but that takes medical knowledge and might risk a ‘too hard’ refusal from the DHB.

The third issue is going from 1750 in four years to “at least one every day”.  On average, there were about 1.2 events per day.  At that rate it would be really surprising (and newsworthy) if there was at least one every day. You’d expect them to clump more than that.

The simplest mathematical model for counts of events is the Poisson process, which has no ‘built-in’ clumping: it describes a world where there are no high-risk days (hot, humid Saturday nights? Bad sports results?), and where all stabbings are independent (no multiple-stabbing fights or robberies).  Even under the Poisson model, you would expect about 30% of days to have no stabbings.   In the real world, you’d expect more days with two or more stabbings and more days with zero.

Getting less clumpiness than a Poisson model takes some sort of conspiracy.  The best-known NZ example is two-dimensional (space) rather than one-dimensional (time), as in this photo by Flickr user Alexander Kesselaar

Glow worms in a cave spread out more evenly than a Poisson process would predict, because they keep away from each other. Stabbings probably don’t

Team Ratings for Round 6

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 33 matches played, 19 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 57.6%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 6

Here are the predictions for Round 6. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 13

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 72 matches played, 47 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 65.3%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 13

Here are the predictions for Round 13. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 11 Postponed Match

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 88 matches played, 69 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 78.4%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 11 Postponed Match

Here are the predictions for Round 11 Postponed Match. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.