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Basketball Chicago Bulls Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics NBA NBA Finals NBA Playoffs Science Sports Statistics

Ranking NBA Championship Teams

The first thing to note is that just by looking at Basketball-Reference.com there are 62 factors that uniquely classify a team: MP FG FGA FG% 3P 3PA 3P% 2P 2PA 2P% FT FTA FT% ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS OMP OFG OFGA OFG% O3P O3PA O3P% O2P O2PA O2P% OFT OFTA […]

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Basketball Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics NBA Sports Statistics

Ranking NBA Players

The 2015-2016 NBA season is dawning upon us, and as usual, ESPN has been doing their usual #NBArank, where they are ranking players based on the following non-rigorous methodology: We asked, “Which player will be better in 2015-16?” To decide, voters had to consider both the quality and quantity of each player’s contributions to his […]

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Data Analytics Data Science Elections Mathematics Politics Statistics

Canadian Federal Election Predictions for 10/19/2015

Tomorrow is the date of the Canadian Federal Elections. Here are my predictions for the outcome: That is, I predict the Liberals will win, with the NDP trailing very far behind either party. 

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Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics Statistics

Do More Gun Laws Prevent Gun Violence?

Update: March 16, 2018: I have received quite a few comments about my critique of Volokh’s WaPo article, and just as a summary of my reply back to those comments: The main point that I made and demonstrated below is that the concept of a correlation is only useful as a measure of linearity between […]

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Data Analytics Data Science Elections Mathematics Politics Statistics

Let’s not go overboard with this Trump stuff! 

It has certainly become the talk of the town with some of the latest polls showing that Donald Trump is leading Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical 2016 matchup. I decided to run my polling algorithm to simulate 100,000 election matchups between Clinton and Trump. I calibrated my model using a variety of data sources. These were […]

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Data Science Elections Politics Statistics

Hillary Clinton Still Has the Best Chance of Being The Democratic Party Nominee in 2016

A great deal of noise has been made in the previous weeks about the surge in the polls of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. This has led some people to question whether Hillary Clinton will actually end up being the Democratic party nominee in 2016. This was further evidenced by the fact that Sanders is […]

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Basketball Chicago Bulls Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics NBA NBA Finals NBA Playoffs Science Sports Statistics

The “Evolution” of the 3-Point Shot in The NBA

The purpose of this post is to determine whether basketball teams who choose to employ an offensive strategy that involves predominantly shooting three point shots is stable and optimal. We employ a game-theoretical approach using techniques from dynamical systems theory to show that taking more three point shots to a point where an offensive strategy […]

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Basketball Chicago Bulls Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics NBA NBA Finals NBA Playoffs Physics Sports Statistics

Article on Three-Point Shooting in the Modern-Day NBA

  Continuing the debate of the value of three-point shooting in today’s NBA, my article analyzing this issue from a mathematical perspective has now been published on the arXiv, check it out!     

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Biology Cosmology Evolution Mathematics Physics Religon Science Statistics

Mathematical Origins of Life

The purpose of this post is to demonstrate some very beautiful (I think!) mathematics that arises form Darwinian evolutionary theory. It is a real shame that most courses and discussions dealing with evolution never introduce any type of mathematical formalism which is very strange, since at the most fundamental levels, evolution must also be governed by […]

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Basketball Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics NBA NBA Finals NBA Playoffs Sports Statistics

Some Thoughts On Howard Beck’s Bleacher Report Article

Howard Beck had an interesting article today on Bleacher Report, basically suggesting that the NBA finals, in particular, the current style of play embodied by The Golden State Warriors is somehow a vindication of D’Antoni’s basketball philosophies: “Shoot a lot of threes”, “Shoot in 7 seconds or less”, “Play small lineups”, etc… While the Warriors have […]