The US Constitution establishes an indirect system to elect the president and vice president. People elect a college (a group) of electors that then elects the president. This used to be a non-issue and non-event for ages up until in November of 2000 the election was so close in Florida that it required waiting for a few weeks and a Supreme Court decision to decide the winner. Another eventful election happened in 2016 (sans the Supreme Court intervention).
Continue reading “Electoral College Optimization”Category: Analytics
analytics
I am on Fiverr.com…
…And sometimes I wonder why.
Anywho. I mostly do Excel gigs on Fiverr. Ah, by the way, Fiverr.com is a website and marketplace where freelancers showcase the “gigs” they are prepared to work on. There is some literature about Fiverr on Amazon. You can check what I offer on the top menu on this blog under “Services”, the submenu links to some of the gigs (and clicking “Services” links to my profile on Fiverr).
A neural network approach to college football rankings
The usual image of an artificial neural network:
What follows is a paper that I wrote in the Spring of 2001 for an “Introduction to Neural Networks” class that I took as part of my Master’s degree. It is mostly a review of someone else’s paper on the subject, except that I wrote the network in Excel and ran it on that year’s football season games. Fun, fun. Continue reading “A neural network approach to college football rankings”
McNemar’s test and Simpson’s Paradox (and the “hot hand” in basketball)
(I wrote this paper in 2007 for a Statistics class I took while trying to do a Ph.D. I am sharing it here for posterity.)
McNemar’s test is a non-parametric method used on nominal data to determine whether the row and column marginal frequencies are equal. It is applied to 2×2 contingency tables with a dichotomous trait with matched pairs of subjects.
Simpson’s paradox is a statistical paradox in which the successes of several groups seem to be reversed when the groups are combined. This seemingly impossible result is encountered often in social science statistics and occurs when a weighting variable, which is not relevant to the individual group assessment, must be used in the combined assessment.
The paper evaluates the potential effect of Simpson’s paradox in McNemar’s test results and conclusions.
Continue reading “McNemar’s test and Simpson’s Paradox (and the “hot hand” in basketball)”