A friend recently asked me what I thought about parlay betting. I figured this would make a good case study on practical data science. I’ll go over this like what would normally happen in a consulting engagement. Let’s get into it. The Question/Problem Friend thought parlay dumbing was a dumb bet and that sports books… Read More Practical Data Science: An Analysis of Sports Betting Winnability
A pair trade is just like the name implies, trading pairs of stocks. You do it when you notice pairs of stocks that seem related. Coke and Pepsi is a classic pair trade example because they both had market tailwinds but their stocks didn’t always follow the same short term pattern. But longer term had… Read More Extremely Basic Pair Trading Backtest in Python
Earlier in the month, I posted a picture on social media comparing fantasy football team points compared with their draft position. Would you believe 4th pick is the worst spot in a fantasy football draft? Early data I’m acquiring is painting that picture #fantasyfootball pic.twitter.com/z8z7Zebgiv — Person (@ergosum_person) July 24, 2017 I thought I found… Read More A Quick Look into Fantasy Football Team Stats
This guide is to help you understand where to find data on sports, especially free sports data. Most of it requires coding so I’m working on creating a data scraping guide too. To skip all this work, sign up at Sports Data Direct and let them deal with getting the data for you. Contents MLB Data The… Read More The Guide to Sports Data
With the all star break upon us, I wanted to see how team records at the all star break compare to full season performance. The Chicago Cubs sit below .500 with a 43-45 record (.489) and as a White Sox Fan I get giddy at the prospect of them not doing well again. Last season… Read More Are the Cubs Bad Again? Visualizing MLB Team Records at the All Star Break
Last week, I wrote about using the Google Maps API to visualize travel times according to when you want to leave by using their “Depart at” feature to simulate traffic. This week I took it a step further and made an interactive version. Go give it a try next time you have to drive somewhere, especially… Read More Visualization Vednesday: Travel Times Interactive Version
Algorithmia was recently in the news for receiving Series A funding from Google. The concept is pretty cool. Create a marketplace for machine learning algorithms that allows companies without a large R&D team to use algorithms as a black box. Algorithmia: How it works I created an account and was given “credits” to call algorithms.… Read More Algorithmia for Lolcat OCR Review
Before diving into how exactly Nate Silver’s Elo algorithm works I want to tell you a little about Nate Silver. Nate Silver first became famous from his MLB player projection tool PECOTA and managing Baseball Prospectus, a website devoted to baseball “sabermetrics”. Nate became publicly famous for predicting 49/50 states in the 2008 presidential election and was named… Read More Replicating Nate Silver’s NBA Elo Algorithm
Everyone thinks the NBA is rigged and it’s definitely been true in the past with the 2007 NBA Betting Scandal. But with last nights final’s game many questionable fouls were called in the first half and the issue on everyone’s minds. Last night I was talking with some friends and decided to actually look at… Read More Is the NBA Rigged? Analysis of Fouls in Clinching Games
I was exploring the DataTables library for jQuery and was a bit shocked that it did not support dynamic columns for a fixed-width array of json objects natively. You would think that the top search result for jquery table library could support json data directly as the view but datatables only supports hard-coding the columns found in… Read More DataTables with Dynamic Columns