An interesting machine learning problem: Can one figure out the relationship between the popular vote margin, voter turnout, and the percentage of electoral college votes a candidate wins? Going back to the election of John Quincy Adams, the raw data looks like this: Electoral College Party Popular vote Margin (%) Turnout Percentage of EC John […]
Category: Data Analytics
In this article, I will use Data Science / Machine Learning methodologies to break down the real factors separating the playoff from non-playoff teams. In particular, I used the data from Basketball-Reference.com to associate 44 predictor variables which each team: “FG” “FGA” “FG.” “X3P” “X3PA” “X3P.” “X2P” “X2PA” “X2P.” “FT” “FTA” “FT.” “ORB” “DRB” “TRB” […]
I was thinking about how one can use the NBA’s new SportVU system to figure out optimal positions for players on the court. One of the interesting things about the SportVU system is that it tracks player coordinates on the court. Presumably, it also keeps track of whether or not a player located at makes […]
Everyone by now knows about this paper I wrote a few months ago: http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05266 Using data science / machine learning methodologies, it basically showed that the most important factors in characterizing a team’s playoff eligibility are the opponent field goal percentage and the opponent points per game. This seems to suggest that defensive factors as […]
Further to my original post on using physics to predict the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections, I have now written a cloud-based app using the powerful Wolfram Cloud to pull the most recent polling data on the web from The HuffPost Pollster, which “tracks thousands of public polls to give you the latest […]
In recent days, Donald Trump proposed yet another iteration of his immigration policy which is focused on “Keeping America Safe” as part of his plan to “Make America Great Again!”. In this latest iteration, in addition to suspending visas from countries with terrorist ties, he is also proposing introducing an ideological test for those entering […]
Here are some thoughts on the US GDP based on some data I’ve been looking at recently, mostly motivated by some Donald Trump supporters that have been criticizing President Obama’s record on the GDP and the economy. First, analyzing the real GDP’s average growth per year, we obtain that (based on a least squares regression […]
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
As I write this, Cleveland just won the series 4-3. What was behind each team’s wins and losses in this series? First, Golden State: A correlation plot of their per game predictor variables versus the binary win/loss outcome is as follows: The key information is in the last column of this matrix: Evidently, the most […]
As usual, here is the post-game breakdown of Game 2 of the NBA Finals between Cleveland and Golden State. Using my live-tracking app to track the relevant factors (as explained in previous posts) here are the live-captured time series: Computing the correlations between each time series above and the Golden State Warriors point difference, we […]
Relativity Digest 