Machine March Madness 2014

[Dr. Pain]

I'd like to invite everyone here to join the Machine March Madness contest for 2014.  Details can be found on my blog here.

The password to the Yahoo Pool is "robotsrule".  The pool can be found here.

A good source of data is the Kaggle competition, but if they don't have what you need, post something here and we'll see what we can do.

Thanks and good luck!

-- Scott

PS.  By competing you agree to gift me $10M if you win the Quicken $1B Pool :-)

[Brian Brechbuhl]

Is Kaggle going to post an updated data set of games and scores?

Brian

[Scott Turner]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 12:02 PM, Brian Brechbuhl <brian.b...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is Kaggle going to post an updated data set of games and scores?

Yes.  There's a lot of discussion about that in the Forums if you want the details.

-- Scott

[Timothy Morgan]

This may be a silly question... but, lets say I am calculating the TrueSkill of each team for use in predicting match-ups. Is my thinking "correct" to reset the TrueSkill at the beginning of each season because teams vary in makeup and ability from year to year? ... I am also wondering if there may be a good statistic to carry over from year to year (...maybe a 2-3 year TrueSkill average?)

[Scott Turner]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 9:32 AM, Timothy Morgan <tmthy....@gmail.com> wrote:

This may be a silly question... but, lets say I am calculating the TrueSkill of each team for use in predicting match-ups. Is my thinking "correct" to reset the TrueSkill at the beginning of each season because teams vary in makeup and ability from year to year? ... I am also wondering if there may be a good statistic to carry over from year to year (...maybe a 2-3 year TrueSkill average?)

My experience has been that carrying over history from the previous season is only valuable during the first 500-600 games in the next season.  So for predicting the tournament, I would not recommend doing that.

If you search "early season" on my blog (netprophet.blogspot.com) you'll see some postings on the topic, e.g., http://netprophetblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/early-season-predictions-part-2.html

-- Scott

[Brandon Kling]

Just wanted to say hello....  This will be my first time entering the annual Machine March Madness.  I'm from Michigan, so GO BLUE!  (although I wish my model had them going farther)

Brandon

Bloomfield, MI

brando...@gmail.com

On Friday, March 7, 2014 9:59:37 PM UTC-5, Dr. Pain wrote:

[Eric Akers]

My perfect bracket was done being perfect after the first game ended. Otherwise, I would've been happy to give you $10M. 

Eric

[Scott Turner]

There are a few competitors in the Machine March Madness pool that I don't think have contacted me.  If you joined from this group and haven't sent me an email, please do.  I'd like to ask you a few questions for my blog.

-- Scott