If You Can't Get Better, Get More Unpredictable
/For the weaker team in any contest which rewards only victory (or at least does so disproportionately to the rewards for proximity to victory), variability can be an advantage.
Read MoreThe Monash Tipping Competitions: Setting Targets
/Monash University has been running AFL tipping competitions for over 20 years and this year is offering three, all of which are open to the public.
Read MoreKicking Accuracy : Teams, Rounds and Correlations
/Accurate kicking, obviously, contributes to a team's success. But, just how much does it contribute, what are some of the sources of its variability, and just how predictable is it?
Read MorePredicting the Final Ladder
/Discussions about the final finishing order of the 18 AFL teams are popular at the moment. In the past few weeks alone I've had an e-mail request for my latest prediction of the final ordering (which I don't have), a request to make regular updates during the season, a link to my earlier post on the teams' 2015 schedule strength turning up in a thread on the bigfooty site about the whole who-finishes-where debate, and a Twitter conversation about just how difficult it is, probabilistically speaking, to assign the correct ladder position to all 18 teams.
Read MoreEnsemble Encore
/The idea of ensemble learning and prediction intrigues me, which, I suppose, is why I've written about it so often here on MoS, for example here in introducing the Really Simple Margin Predictors, here in a more theoretical context, and, much earlier, here about creating an ensemble from different Head-to-Head predictors. The basic concept, which is that a combination of forecasters can outperform any single one of them, seems plausible yet remarkable. By taking nothing more than what we already have - a set of forecasts - we're somehow able to conjure empirical evidence for the cliche that "none of us is better than all of us" (at least some of the time).
Read MoreAFL Crowds and Optimal Uncertainty
/Fans the world over, the literature shows, like a little uncertainty in their sports. AFL fans are no different, as I recounted in a 2012 blog entitled Do Fans Really Want Close Games? in which I described regressions showing that crowds were larger at games where the level of expected surprisal or 'entropy' was higher.
Read MoreThe Effects of Narrow Wins and Losses On Subsequent Performance
/I've often heard it asserted after a team's close loss that it will "bounce back harder next week". With a little work, that's a testable claim.
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