Nigel Marriott's Blog

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

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EPL 2017/18 #2 – My Prediction of the Final League Table – Round 29

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With 10 games to go, the 2018 EPL is now entering its final quarter and supporters of all teams are starting to wonder where their team will finish in the league.  As a Newcastle United supporter, my team is stuck right in the middle of one of the tightest relegation battles in living memory.  At the other end of the table, my wife’s team Spurs are almost certainly out of the running for the title but Champions League qualification is definitely in their sights.  To set expectations, I have used a statistical method known as Poisson modelling to predict the final league table come May 13th and I will update this post after every round of games between now and then so please bookmark this page.

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6 Nations #10 – Who will win in 2018? – Week 3

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After two weeks of the 2018 6 Nations, all 6 of my match predictions have been correct.  Whilst this might be vindication of the World Rugby ranking model, the last thing we want in sport is a perfect prediction model otherwise what’s the point?  Where would be the excitement of watching sport live?  So I am hoping for an incorrect prediction soon …

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6 Nations #9 – Who will win in 2018? – Week 2

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The 2018 6 Nations is underway and all of my predictions for week 1 turned out to be correct (just!) with the help of an amazing drop goal drop goal by Johnny Sexton.  This means that out of 37 matches I have used rankings to make predictions, 30 have been correct.

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UK Weather Tracker #12 – January 2018

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Every time I went online in January, I would find a headline promising an extreme cold snap in the UK which never materialised.  I’ve grown tired and cynical of these headlines and given that the latest met office data shows that January 2018 was completely unremarkable, I think I am justified in this attitude! [Read more…] about UK Weather Tracker #12 – January 2018

6 Nations #8 – Who will win in 2018? – Week 1

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The 2018 6 Nations begins tomorrow and fans will be looking forward to a feast of rugby for the next two months.  As always, pundits galore are making their predictions and the one thing we can count on is that some will have egg on their faces by the time it is over.  In 2017, I used World Rugby’s Rankings to predict who would win each match in the 6 Nations and the Autumn Internationals and these predictions worked out well with 12 out of 15 6 Nations games and 15 out of the 19 Autumn International matches involving 6 Nations teams correctly called.

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UK Opinion Poll Tracker #9 – December 2017

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Labour continues to hold a small lead over the Conservatives as the nation entered the Christmas holidays.  There is evidence of some voter movement towards UKIP which indicates that their true national level is around 4% or 5% and their General Election performance was distorted by so many of their candidates standing down.

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UK Weather Trends #3 – Autumn 2017

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Meteoologists define autumn in the UK to be the period from September to November so autumn is now over and we are officially in winter.  The 2017 autumn was completely unremarkable but this hides the fact that our autumnal climate has changed quite notably over the last 25 years.

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