Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Predicting the spread

Have you ever been working on a problem and had that nagging feeling that you're missing an obvious solution? Well, I'm having one of those moments now. I'm working on a project that, though it has nothing to do with sports or betting, is analogous to the following:

You want to build a model predicting the spread for games in a new football league. Because the line-up of teams is still in flux, you decide to use only stats from individual teams as inputs (for example, an indicator variable for when the Ambushers play the Ravagers would not be allowed). In other words, you're using data from individuals to predict a metric that is only defined for pairs.

Assume there are around fifty teams and each team has played all of the others exactly one time.

This feels like stat 101 but I can't recall seeing another problem like it. Anyone out there have any suggestions?

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