ELynah Forum

Quote from: BearLover on January 25, 2026, 10:25:58 AMIn the NPI the teams are tightly packed together. Only 65 hundredths of a point separates Q in 8th place (55.89) from Denver in 13th place (55.24). Given that going forward we will mostly be playing lowly ranked teams, there's potential for us to drop to 13th or so with one loss and then outside the bubble with another loss. (Of course, we can offset this by stacking wins outside those losses.)

You're right that the low ranking of our future opponents puts us at NPI risk. I feel like we run into this every year with the ECAC.

An upside from an NPI perspective that is unique to this year, as I believe you have mentioned elsewhere, is that 70% of our regular season games going forward are on the road (that feels absurd to say on January 25). Road wins count 50% more than road losses (excluding neutral sites). From a location perspective, there was a concentration of "NPI risk" the past four weekends that we got through in good shape.

Doesn't mean there isn't ANY potential for bad losses at Lynah this year (looking at you, St. Lawrence), but I'd speculate we've gotten through more than typical at this point in the season (2x Alaska, 2x UNO, Brown, Yale, Union, RPI)

Or the pep band and marching band.

Quote from: TrotskyThe statement that the probabilities are too high has not been demonstrated empirically.  They may be, they may not, but "feeling" they are too high is not a mathematical argument.

Easy enough to run the numbers.  If people want to put some reality behind their gut feelings, they should.

Actually, jfeath17 demonstrated that KRACH-based win percentages over 65% were too high empirically five years ago. He looked at results for 1,129 games in 2016 and 2017. here.

IMO, applying this kind of "translation" of KRACH-based win percentages to empirically-based ones is probably the best way to improve the Pairwise Probability Matrix. The frustrating thing is that potential outcomes have changed since jfeath17 did this analysis (OT wins count different than regulation wins).

I think it would be appropriate to have a banner for each team acknowledging that they had the highest winning percentage in men's and women's hockey. I think it's debatable whether or not the men should be considered national champions as they were not higher in KRACH or Pairwise. The top winning percentages are not debatable.

Quote from: TrotskyA 2-loss season and finishing with a 9-game wining streak wouldn't be bad.

But man this would be disappointing.

Yes, it's the prudent thing to do.

Stupid prudence.

+1

Quote from: adamwI'd put the odds of having fans at Lake Placid or any NCAA games at 0.47%

math

Based on how many Monte Carlo simulations?

I've critiqued the Pairwise Probability Matrix the last couple of weeks, but I think it's worth stating that it is WAY better suited to answer the question posed in this week's USCHO bracketology post (Which bubble teams have a shot at playing for an NCAA hockey national championship?).

Quote from: adamw

Quote from: KGR11Here's an example of the issue with using KRACH to predict final pairwise:

Cornell (KRACH Rating: 526) is playing St Lawrence (KRACH Rating: 11) in a few weeks. My understanding is that the ratings can be used to come up with a pseudo-record between the two teams (Cornell with 526 wins, St Lawrence with 11). The Monte Carlo simulation uses this record to determine how often Cornell wins. In this case, the model predicts they win 98% of the time.

jfeath's regression analysis from 2 years ago shows that a team with a KRACH winning percentage of 100% theoretically wins about 83.4% of the time, 14.5% lower than what KRACH states for the Cornell-St Lawrence game.

I think it makes sense for 83.4% to be an upper bound on winning percentage. Any goalie can have an incredible/incredibly bad day. Also, the fact that there are ties in hockey means that the winning percentage should be more weighted to 50% than a sport where you can't have ties.

Ideally, jfeath's regression analysis would be an in-between step in the Pairwise probability matrix to convert the KRACH winning percentages (which show what happened to date) to predictive winning percentages.

1st - this kind of disparity is extreme. St. Lawrence is historically lousy right now. I'd venture to say, Cornell probably would win 98% of the time.

2nd - ties are taken into consideration with a hard-coded 19% chance - which is already acting as a smoothing mechanism. It's probably not accurate to hard-code that value for every matchup - but it does act as a "smoother," so to speak. This lowers Cornell's chance of a win to closer to the 83% you're referring to. Cornell is winning 98% of the 81% percent of non-ties. So, 80% - plus 9.5%'s worth of win value (i.e. points) via the tie.

Hard-coding ties like that is a huge deal. You effectively changed the maximum winning percentage from 100% to 90%. That makes the simulation framework way better than I thought, since your max winning percentage is closer to jfeath's maximum winning percentage of 83%. The next time you publish a primer for the probability matrix, it might be worth including this.

I pointed to an extreme-disparity game because those are the games where KRACH overestimates the favorite team's winning percentage (per jfeath's analysis). That analysis shows that KRACH lines up pretty well when the favorite has a projected winning percentage of 70% or less. Somewhat of a moot point given the 19% tie input.

I'm tempted to propose a 50-1 bet for the Cornell-SLU game. Best case scenario, Cornell wins and I lose $2. Worst case scenario, Cornell loses and I win $100. Just seems a bit sacrilege.

Here's an example of the issue with using KRACH to predict final pairwise:

Cornell (KRACH Rating: 526) is playing St Lawrence (KRACH Rating: 11) in a few weeks. My understanding is that the ratings can be used to come up with a pseudo-record between the two teams (Cornell with 526 wins, St Lawrence with 11). The Monte Carlo simulation uses this record to determine how often Cornell wins. In this case, the model predicts they win 98% of the time.

jfeath's regression analysis from 2 years ago shows that a team with a KRACH winning percentage of 100% theoretically wins about 83.4% of the time, 14.5% lower than what KRACH states for the Cornell-St Lawrence game.

I think it makes sense for 83.4% to be an upper bound on winning percentage. Any goalie can have an incredible/incredibly bad day. Also, the fact that there are ties in hockey means that the winning percentage should be more weighted to 50% than a sport where you can't have ties.

Ideally, jfeath's regression analysis would be an in-between step in the Pairwise probability matrix to convert the KRACH winning percentages (which show what happened to date) to predictive winning percentages.

Quote from: BearLoverCasually getting screwed every single year.

Yeah, that decision is screwed up.

Quote from: adamw

Quote from: TrotskySeems to me that HC winning would be a godsend for the committee since it locks down a presumptive patsy and a site.  St. Cloud gets the Bemidji 2009 Memorial Reward and goes to Worcester and the committee only has to worry about the 1/4 permutations of the other 3 sites.

It's iron clad that the committee will never cross over a tier line, right?  (e.g., they would never move the #4 overall to a 2-seed to duck a North Dakota "4 seed home game."  If that's set in stone I don't see a lot of chaos -- just somebody getting inevitably and deterministically well and truly fucked.  I would expect that to be the 4.  If Mankato sneaks into the 4 I'd practically guarantee it -- Mankato is closer to Sioux Falls than is NoDak (as is, for that matter, St. Cloud.  The West is big.).

That is correct - not crossing over is sacrosanct - though I've argued many times it shouldn't be, in extreme cases.

You're right that it's not chaos, in the sense that it makes things obvious about who goes where, but it is messier, for sure.  Even if North Dakota doesn't make it, but Holy Cross does ... it means that instead of (relatively) nearby Sioux Falls, St. Cloud will be forced to go to Worcester.  We already know St. Cloud can't go to Sioux Falls if North Dakota was there - but Holy Cross' involvement would be an extra scenario where St. Cloud can't go to Sioux Falls.

There's something screwed up with the #1 overall seed being forced to fly to the worst overall team. I'd bet St. Cloud State prefers this to playing a BC-caliber team in Sioux Falls, but I think it points to the inequity in the "hosting" framework. I can understand that host schools should be rewarded for their efforts, but I don't think every school has the geographic opportunity to host: will the Alaska schools ever host a regional? What about the schools on the Upper Peninsula?

Quote from: jfeath17While you can't perfectly verify a prediction model, you can get an idea of its performance by separating the past data into training and testing sets. The fact that we are trying to predict probabilities and not simple classification does make it much more difficult to evaluate the performance. For classification problems the predictor is either right or wrong so it is easy to state a accuracy percentage. We however cannot directly observe the outcome probability of some matchup but only outcome of one trial of this matchup. This brings us to what I am attempting to do. By looking at the outcomes of many games with a similar krach predicted winning percentage we can come up with an estimate for the actual winning percentage of a team in this matchup.

My methodology for this was to use a gaussian weighted average of the games centered at varying krach probabilities. I calculated the winning percentage using these weights. I also used the weights to come up with average krach probability (this doesn't necessarily line up with the center of the gaussian particularly at the endpoints where all the games are to one side or the other). This is basically the logical extrapolation of the binning that was suggested earlier in the thread. The binning was actually the first analysis I did but the data didn't look good. I think the major improvement here is not that I am using the gaussian to come up with weights (that is probably overkill), but that I am using the weighted average of the krach probabilities rather than the center of the bin. What this trend line looks like can be changed significantly by changing the std dev of the gaussian (effectively changing the bin size). Basically the larger the bin the more underfit and the smaller the more overfit.


I also sought to measure the performance of KRACH in another way by looking at the R² (Coefficient of Determination) The Wikipedia page is a pretty good explanation of this. The R^2 value can be looked at as the percentage of variance in the dependent variable (game outcomes) that can be explained by the independent variable (krach probability, etc..). These probabilities are all very low which makes sense since there is a lot of variability in the outcome of hockey games.

Independent Variable                 | R^2
--------------------------------------------------
Krach Probability                    | 0.023
Logistic Regression                  | 0.100
Linear Fit on Gaussian Average (0.1) | 0.112
        (y=.749x+.126)


Another improvement I made was to include the inverse of each game (prob = 1-prob and swap wins and losses). This improves the fit around 0.5 since it is a little nonsensical if the matchup of two equal KRACH teams is not 0.5 in a model only dependent on KRACH.


One final point which I think has been established at this point, but I want to make sure we are all on the same page. Predictive models are going to have some subjectivity built into them. It is great that KRACH has no subjectivity and is a mathematically pure ranking for its goal of NCAA seeding since that needs to be "fair" and should be based on the actual outcomes of the games. However when creating a predictive model, we unfortunately do not have the luxury of a mathematically pure system. There are parameters and methods that must be chosen both when designing a predictor and measuring the performance. It is the designers goal to choose these such that the predictor is not over/underfit or have any bias's built in.

Many thanks to jfeath for this awesome work. One think I'd be curious to know is how the R-squared for the KRACH, Logistic Regression, and Linear Fit on Gaussian Average varies from year to year. This could give an indication of the extent (if any) that KRACH is a lesser predictor than your outputs.

Quote from: Trotsky

Quote from: adamw

Quote from: abmarksit would be interesting to run a KRACH computation for last year's full NHL regular season, for example, and then see if the numbers pass people's gut checks or not.

This is honestly an unnecessary exercise. For past results, it's hard to improve on KRACH. The KRACH ratings, if you played the schedule that already happened, would come out to the actual results.  That's the whole point of KRACH's existence.

How about this exercise.  Number all the NC$$ games in chron order.  Calculate KRACH from the odd number games.  Now compare how the even numbered games turned out against KRACH "predictions."

I know, I know, I know that KRACH reviews a data set and is not designed to be predictive.  But... can you do that for shits and giggles?  I'm not even sure how we'd interpret the results.  What constitutes a reliable or unreliable percentage of accuracy?  I mean, hopefully it's over 50%.  Hopefully it's better than just taking whoever has the better winning percentage excluding games against each other.

Another method: start on game 1 and just march through the list constantly recalculating KRACH and using that as the prediction against the next game.  Or since obviously KRACH gets better as the season goes on, iterate through say the first 10% of games and only start predicting after that.  Now get your accuracy score.  That's truly abusing KRACH as predictive.  

I think your second method is essentially what jfeath did, right?

Quote from: BearLoverI think this discussion is getting old too, but since some people keep saying those criticizing the model are doing so based on "feel," I just want to say that we really aren't. (a) jfeath17 already showed KRACH overstates the chances of higher-ranked teams winning an individual game. (b) When combining several artificially inflated individual probabilities together (Cornell's chances of winning the quarters, semis, and finals) to form one joint probability (Cornell winning the ECAC tournament), you end up with a very, very overly inflated likelihood (the 55% chance of Cornell winning the ECAC). (c) There are no betting odds for any NHL game that come close to the odds this model is assigning many games every weekend.

Just to be clear, jfeath17's analysis shows that KRACH overstates the winning percentage for higher ranked teams if the KRACH winning % is greater than 65%. Otherwise, KRACH slightly underestimates the favorite team. Because of Cornell's impressive record, this nuance would only impact games against teams as good or better than Clarkson. It'd be interesting to see if that holds true for future seasons.

Using jfeath17's work would imply that the "true" probability of a game's outcome is based on the historical results of games with a similar KRACH difference between opponents. This assumption cannot be correct because each team is different, but how incorrect it is is dependent on the variability.

The current probability matrix says "What happens if teams maintain their current winning percentage going forward (adjusted for strength of schedule)?"
Using jfeath17's methodology, it would says "What happens if teams perform as well as the historical average team with similar KRACH ratings?"

Both are great questions with meaningful answers, but for forecasting, I would trust a matrix with jfeath17's adjustment slightly more than the current probability matrix (with the BIG assumption that the variation in results isn't ridiculous).

Quote from: adamwThe beauty of it is, what anyone thinks of Cornell's chances vs. one team or another doesn't matter. KRACH is what it is.  And there is nothing better that perfectly captures PAST results.  There are many "flaws" if you will to the model when it comes to projecting odds of winning future games - but I don't think they're flaws. They're just incomplete.  All of the reasons stated are valid.  But, as someone said, you'd need to come to the issue with actual valid math, and a better algorithm, before getting all hot and bothered about it.  Until then, saying that you "feel" that 52% chance is "flawed" is just as "flawed" of an argument as anything else.

Polls are a shit-ton more flawed than this is - doesn't stop Jim from posting them ... I've given him grief about it in the past, but all in fun. Would never tell him to stop.

Feel free to point out things all you want. But until you have a better model, and are willing to program it, then jeebus h. criminy, let people discuss it. It does a pretty fair job of giving you a portrait of what could happen.  I think everyone here (unlike many other places) is smart enough to know to take it with some grain of salt.  But it's as good a guideline as you've got.

Agreed. KRACH does an awesome job of ranking teams based on games played. For forecasting games, I think jfeath17's work could take it to the next level. In her logistic regression, the closer the KRACH winning percentage is to 100, the greater the difference between the KRACH winning percentage and the outcome winning percentage. I think this makes a lot of sense: if a team has a perfect record, they can still lose future games (example: 2007 Patriots and 2015 Kentucky basketball), so a team with a nearly perfect record should also have a lower probability of winning future games.

I think the biggest challenge for jfeath17 is that there's only 2 years of data. I think the next step is gather data for a couple of years and see how stable that logistic regression is year-to-year. jfeath17, I'd be interested to see a more detailed procedure that you used. That way, if you ended up stepping back, someone else could try this.