April 03, 2008
Bookies' Nightmare: New Program Outperformed All Other NCAA Predictions
Via EurekAlert!, over at Georgia Tech:
Sports professionals and fans get pretty emotional about their picks for the NCAA basketball tournament each year, and that emotion often clouds their judgment.
But three engineering professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a computer ranking system, called LRMC, that consistently predicts NCAA basketball rankings more accurately than the AP poll of sportswriters and the ESPN/USA Today poll of coaches, formulas (the Ratings Percentage Index), other computer models (the Massey ratings and the Sagarin ratings), and even the tournament seeds themselves.
After correctly picking all four of this year’s finalists, the LRMC method has now identified 30 of the last 36 Final Four participants (83 percent accuracy over the past nine years of NCAA tournaments) as one of the top two teams in their region. Over the same nine-year stretch, the seedings and polls have correctly identified only 23, and the RPI indentified 21.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 03:59 PM | Permalink
Comments
I'd be interested to know if the system actually predicted the past winners, or if, like so many presidential "prediction" systems, it has been developed to get the right answers for past events, which are then labeled "predictions."
The article doesn't make it clear which, nor can I easily tell from the linked summary by the creators. Getting the right answers for your seed data isn't a prediction, and the data set, though not as small as presidential elections, is still small enough that I have my doubts. If they make predictions next year without further adjustment based on this year's results, then it might be newsworthy.
Posted by: Redshift | Apr 3, 2008 4:56:26 PM
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