Archives (240)

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.

I wasn’t going to post about this, but I’ve seen two good Kiwi journalists retweet versions of this today already and I’m having a sense of humour failure about it.

A US public relations company did a phone survey. They don’t describe the methodology very clearly (a bad sign), but suppose we assume for the sake of argument that it was competent.  They don’t given the exact question they asked (also a bad sign), but their conclusion was

• 38% of beer-drinking Americans would not buy Corona under any circumstances now

Ten years ago, I lived in the US and would have counted as a ‘beer-drinking American’ for phone survey purposes.  I would probably have answered ‘Never’ to a question on whether I would buy Corona.  Strictly speaking, that might have been an exaggeration (and let me point you to one of the great 1980s Australian beer ads as a possible counterexample), but as far as I recall I didn’t ever buy Corona.

Lots of ‘beer-drinking Americans’ don’t buy Corona because they don’t like the flavour or because it’s advertised for a different social group, or whatever. It wouldn’t be surprising if that came to 38% who always preferred Bud or Molson or Coors or Mirror Pond Pale Ale or PBR.

The survey also asked people who usually drank Corona (clearly a minority of the respondents) whether they would still drink it. 4% said no. Unless your survey is exceptionally well conducted, that’s down at the level of alien abductions and lizard people.

The CNN story also referred to a YouGov survey that said the ‘intent to buy Corona’ was at the lowest level in two years. Here’s the graph

Intent to buy Corona is down about one percentage point from Christmas and maybe two-tenths of a percentage point from October.

While I’m on the topic, I’d like to point out the Infodemic blog. It goes into great detail (with animated gifs and so on) on simple ways to fact-check claims about coronavirus — or anything else.   It’s the same sort of techniques that I use in writing StatsChat, but Mike Caulfield explains them patiently and carefully and I just try to show how I use them.

Team Ratings for Round 5

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 27 matches played, 16 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 59.3%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 5

Here are the predictions for Round 5. 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 12

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 66 matches played, 45 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 68.2%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 12

Here are the predictions for Round 12. 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 83 matches played, 65 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 78.3%.
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.

• “To be clear I’m not saying that the numbers are wrong, I’m just saying that you can’t have a circle representing $401m be smaller than the lump representing $223m” Felix Salmon, about this graphic from a NY Times story. These ‘bubble’ graphics can be seriously misleading, though they probably wouldn’t violate NZ advertising standards
  
• A popular self-driving car dataset is missing labels for hundreds of pedestrians
• The weirdness of UK gold export statistics, from Ed Conway on Twitter
• A very nice piece from Hamish Rutherford at the NZ Herald, on how Ardern and Bridges can disagree so much about economic growth.
• NY Post claims ‘majority of serial killers are Taurus’, attributing the ‘research’ to Britain’s Daily Mirror. It would be surprising if this were true, and it isn’t. The Mirror actually says “more killers on [a thriller author’s] list were Taureans – born between April 20 and May 20 – than any other star sign.” You might then worry how comprehensive or representative this list was.  Or you might wonder whether 8 out of 35 is surprisingly high for the star sign with the most entries on the list.  Or, you might think “astrology <eyeroll emoji>” (James Heathers on Twitter)