ELynah Forum

This is Robin.  Harvard Sucks tickets are on sale right now.

Robin again posting from Elliot's computer.

Just called and ordered ECAC hockey tickets from Cornell ticket office (yes I realize I could walk into the Albany arena at the time of the game and buy a couple thousand tickets) .  The woman said they have a "long line at the window" and will be processing those requests first and then moving to phone orders.

How accurate has Lunardi been in years past?

--Robin

Any way to find out potential times of the games in Providence?

Is there a verdict on the Sports Depot?

Me!

- Elliot '98

I'll be there!

I also booked a room at the Motel6. It's got two beds, so if anyone wants to split it, that's fine with me.

Jeff Newman and I will be watching at Joe's on Weed in Chicago. If anyone wants to join us, feel free. You can call me at 773-960-2994.

- Elliot '98

I'll be there!

- Elliot

I'm in the bay area (SF at the moment) on vacation and looking for a place to watch the final. If anyone's going out to a bar or something, give me a ring: 773-960-2994. (I won't be sitting in front of a computer, so a post here won't help much.)

Thanks!

- Elliot

[Q]Newman Wrote:

> Teams 1-15 in KRACH have a statistical claim on being #1 at a 95% confidence level (which, ignoring the fact the KRACH has little to do with tournament selection, makes having a 16 team tournament rather an auspicious size).[/q]

Are you making that claim based on the fact that the confidence intervals for the top 15 teams all cover CC's actual KRACH rating? Or is it based on the analysis in your spreadsheet where everything was done relative to CC? (Perhaps those are equivalent, although I suspect not.)

I must say, I'm surprised the intervals are so wide. I guess that explains why there's so much arguing over rankings.

- Elliot

[Q]LarryW Wrote:

To measure a variance requires you to define the extent to which the initial knowledge is imperfect.  But, to what extent is the W-L-T(1-0-0.5) info of a given game imperfect?  20%, 10%, does it depend on the score?[/q]

What you're suggesting is considerably more complicated than what I had in mind. I was taking for granted that each game is a 1/0 outcome -- plus ties, of course. The Bradley-Terry model is based on that assumption, so if you question that, you're off thinking about different models.

My point was just that within the context of the existing model you can calculate standard errors for the parameter estimates and use them to get things like confidence intervals for the KRACH ratings. Even something as simple as a graph of 95% confidence intervals for each team's KRACH rating would give a nice picture of which teams are truly different and which are statistically indistinguishable.

The TUC business is essentially a "weighted" winning percentage, where a game gets a weight of 1 if it's against a TUC and a weight of 0 otherwise. A natural alternative, which would eliminate the problem of teams popping in and out of TUC status would be to make the weights a continuous function of the opponent's RPI.

On the issue of KRACH...people talk about it as if it were the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it's still an estimate of the "true" rankings. Like any other estimate, it is subject to the lack of information available for comparing certain pairs of teams -- like Dartmouth and Wisconsin, as discussed in Adam Wodon's column. Since KRACH fits a statistical model, there should be variance estimates that go with things like the KRACH rating. It seems to me the variance of a team's KRACH rating would be a good measure of how volatile its position in the rankings is. Are those available anywhere?

- Elliot

I'm in. See y'all there.

- Elliot '98