Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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Sporting GOATs #1 – English football clubs

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My team Newcastle United are also known as the Magpies but how much of a GOAT are they?  In recent years, this acronym has become popular as a shorthand for Greatest Of All Time.  Given that the Magpies have not won a trophy in the 40+ years that I have supported them, I know they are not the number 1 GOAT in English football but where would they sit in a GOAT table?

Ranking tables are extremely common in sport and sport analytics as they are easily understood by fans.  If I want to compile a ranking of all English football clubs, there are two decisions I have to make:

  1. Over what time period will the data come from? (ERA)
  2. On what measure will I rank the clubs? (METRIC)

In this post I will use 3 eras and 3 metrics to creating 9 GOAT tables in all.  Read on to find out which club is #1 GOAT! [Read more…]

UK Weather Trends #2 – Summer 2017

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Meteorologists define summer in the UK to be the period from June to August so summer is now over and we are officially in autumn.  I have decided to create a series of posts which I will publish at the end of each season showing how that season compares to the weather record.  The 2017 summer was wet but unremarkable otherwise and actually quite typical of recent summers as I will explain.

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EPL 2017/18 #1 – What are you expecting for your team this season?

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The 2017/18 English Premier League (EPL) kicked off yesterday with Arsenal beating Hull 4-3.  Tomorrow, my team Newcastle United will be playing my wife’s team Tottenham Hotspur so marital harmony could be in short supply!  Be that as it may, what should fans of the Magpies and Spurs be expecting this season?  Newcastle are a recently promoted team whilst Spurs were runners up last season  Is there a way to set realistic expectations for the 2017/18 season?

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UK General Election 2017 #7 – Review of my predictions

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Exactly one month ago, the UK woke up to the news that they had elected a hung parliament for the second time in 3 elections.  For many forecasters including myself, this came as a surprise as I had been predicting a Conservative majority of 100 seats.  In the event, the largest ever polling underestimate of the Labour vote was enough to see the Conservatives lose their majority.

At the beginning of my commentary on election night itself, I defined success for my forecasts as being how close the number of Conservative seats was to my forecast of 375.  I also stated that if the number of seats was in the 340s I would consider this to be a prediction error.  The final outcome was 317 seats so clearly that is a major prediction error.

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UK General Elections #2 – How accurate are the opinion polls? – updated with GE17

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Ahead of the 2017 general election, I predicted that the opinion polls would be wrong again and that the Conservatives lead over Labour would be underestimated by 2.6%.   I based this on data provided by Mark Pack who has systematically recorded every opinion poll published since 1945.  In the event, I was right that the polls would be wrong but instead of an error favouring the Conservatives, the polls recorded the largest ever underestimate of the Labour vote.  As a result, election forecasters were blindsided yet again and the result was a hung parliament which few saw coming.

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UK Weather Trends #1 – Spring 2017

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Meteorologists define spring in the UK to be the period from March to May so spring is now over and we are officially in summer.  I have decided to create a series of posts which I will publish at the end of each season showing how that season compares to the weather record.  The 2017 spring turned out to be the 2nd warmest on record.

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