Re: 2016-2017 WCHA Season Thread
If it's dicey, refute it.
I let professionals manage the stock market. Also, these are probabilities. I wouldn't put BSU's chance of being the #1 seed much higher than 60% right now, but I would put them having home ice at something like 95%.
Hey, I'm going to be fine if you all want to come around in mid-February and call me a dunce or something. That's fine.
GFM
You probably know that most professional management of stocks can pretty much be explained by randomness.
Now that I'm reading you more carefully, I don't care to argue at all because it all seems reasonable to me. Thanks. But the true test is long run beating simplistic predictions or WAGs - sort of like how investment managers should be measured, but that's a losing game for them.
In doing this sort of prediction, what sort of factors have you used. Just some thoughts that come to my mind are: Have you considered whether the future schedule equal in difficulty to the past? Home vs. away balance, and which teams, where (good ones at home, bad ones away or vice versa)? Are potential injuries or other random challenges considered - viruses that can knock a team down for a weekend or two, potential academic issues, etc. How about the relative youth or experience of the team vs. teams they've played so far vs. in the future , and how does that factor statistically? Do experienced teams tend to improve less or more over the season than inexperienced teams?
I have no idea what impact these factors would have. I don't know if you've accounted for factors you can fairly objectively predict or measure (strength of schedule, home vs. away, etc. past vs. future), or have plugged in some sort of probability of random events, so I ask. I don't claim that any of them refute your presumption, but wondering if they or others are factored in.
In the a little knowledge can be dangerous department: I've taken some statistics and simulation courses in college (business school - operations management) about 25 years ago and it was fascinating, and very complicated and difficult for me, even at the extremely simple level I was able to "master". I had pretty good luck with my capstone project, because it involved a process I knew pretty well, and I was able to identify critical factors and gin up probabilities for enough of them to achieve good predictions and model for adjusting the process. I say "gin up" but really I tried to do sampling and probabilities/distributions within the limits of how much time and access I had at the time. A little better than a WAG.
But I can't argue or refute with any degree of expertise in the field, which I assume you have. At this point, I'm a general manager (called CEO) of a small company working shallowly but broadly in the non-profit, for-profit and governmental worlds simultaneously. My primary expertise is tolerating uncertainty and being comfortable making imperfect decisions. That being the culture I work in, I always am skeptical of people who think they can calculate stuff like this but interested in how they do it.
All that said, it's hard to disagree that BSU is the team to beat, but I don't claim to figure that out with Math, but just because they're a darn good team this year and only have a couple of teams in the league that can be said to be "good". It will be very interesting to see how they do in their 4 games with MTU.
My University thrust Minitab upon me. I'm not really using it for this — it's a pretty simple Monte Carlo simulation.
