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

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Autumn Internationals #2 – Who will win in 2017? – Week 2

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The second round of the Autumn Internationals take place tomorrow and some tasty matches await us.  Last week, I used World Rugby’s Rankings to predict who will win and to set expectations for each nation for the whole series and my predictions got off to a good start with 5 out of the 6 matches correctly called.  This performance is consistent with a similar set of predictions I made for the 2017 6 Nations where I correctly called 12 out of 15 games.

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Autumn Internationals #1 – Who will win in 2017? – Week 1

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It’s November again and for rugby fans, it means the Autumn Internationals are on us again.  The nations of Europe welcome teams from all over the world for the next 3 or 4 weeks to test each other and find out where they stand.  Ahead of the first round of matches, I have used World Rugby’s Rankings to predict who will win and to set expectations for each nation.

Earlier this year, I made a similar set of predictions for the 2017 6 Nations and correctly called 12 out of 15 games.  The prediction model is explained in one of my 6 Nations post but World Rugby’s goal is that rankings can be used as a predictive tool.  The idea is to take each team’s current ranking and add 3 points to teams playing at home.  Whoever has the higher ranking is then expected to win but clearly the closer the rankings, the closer the game is expected to be. [Read more…] about Autumn Internationals #1 – Who will win in 2017? – Week 1

UK Opinion Poll Tracker #7 – October 2017

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This is my first opinion poll tracker post since the General Election on 8th June 2017.  Nearly 5 months have passed and only now can we say that politics is starting to move on from the election.  I thought it was worth updating this post to see what current voting intentions are but this will not be an in depth post compared to earlier posts.

Since the election, Labour has been leading the Conservatives in the polls by 2% or so.  This is mostly due to defections by some Conservative voters other than that, voter movements have been minor.

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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…] about Sporting GOATs #1 – English football clubs

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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