Personal blog on early retirement and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
…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).
I finally finished reading “The Millionaire Next Door” by Thomas Stanley and William Danko. Early this summer at a garage sale in my neighborhood I got a copy of the first original edition from 1996:
This is the last post in my accidental Fourier-Motzkin trilogy (part one: the method; part two: the baseball lineups), and it’s about the bill coming due. Because when you use elimination to throw variables out of a model, the mathematics is very clear about what you keep — and very quiet about what you lose. I found out exactly what I’d lost the first time DraftKings rejected a lineup my spreadsheet swore was legal. The story runs straight through a beautiful piece of combinatorics called Hall’s marriage theorem, so we’ll pick that up along the way.
Continue reading “Hall’s Marriage Theorem Meets the DraftKings Entry Form”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”In my last post about Fourier-Motzkin elimination I promised a real example involving baseball, and I keep my promises. This is the story of how a dusty 19th-century math trick ended up picking my daily fantasy lineups — and how I stumbled into a genuine Fourier-Motzkin elimination example without fully realizing that’s what I was doing until much later.
Continue reading “A Fourier-Motzkin Elimination Example: DraftKings Lineups”
