At Tuesday's Bay Area R User Group meetup, nine speakers gave five-minute talks on various aspects of R. Revolution Analytics' Luba Gloukhov was one of the presenters, and also provides the summary of the talks below. Links to the slides are included where available for you to check out. Ariel ... [Read more...]

A National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study, published in March, found that professional American football (NFL) players lived longer, on average, than similar "mere mortals" in the general population. Football is a dangerous sport, so that might seem surprising at first, until you consider the fact that NFL ... [Read more...]

Last week, Markus Gesmann used a log-linear model in R to predict the Olympic gold-medal winning 100m sprint time to be 9.68 seconds. The actual time was 9.63 seconds. Not bad! Meanwhile, the New York Times put Usuain Bolt's olympic record in context, comparing him in a virtual race with other gold ... [Read more...]

R user Markus Gesmann used the gold-winning times from the Olympic Men's 100m sprint since 1990 as the basis of the following prediction for the London Games: My simple log-linear model forecasts a winning time of 9.68 seconds, which is 1/100 of a second faster than Usain Bolt's winning time in Beijing in 2008, ... [Read more...]

The biggest prize in UK soccer, the Premier League Championship, is decided by a points system. Unlike most sports competitions, there's no final round or playoff series: once the regular round of games is complete, the team that has accumulated the most points (three for a win, and one for ... [Read more...]

While the US's Major League Soccer is using advanced analytics to analyze ball movement and improve team composition, they might want to think about a smaller, but possibly more impactful, goal for analytics. Like, how to explain to an American audience what a 1-2 game means to a basketball or ... [Read more...]

Why settle for just one realisation of this year’s UEFA Euro when you can let the tournament play out 10,000 times in silico? Since I already had some code lying around from my submission to the Kaggle hosted 2010 Take on the Quants challenge, I figured I’d recycle it for ... [Read more...]

Kevin Quealy, graphics editor at the New York Times, has published another fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the Times creates data visualizations for print and online. In his latest post, he looks at how a visualization of the Yankee's Mariano Rivera performance compared to other Major League Baseball pitchers was ... [Read more...]

Of course, a few days before I leave for a much needed vacation, USA Today released their updated NCAA coaching salary database. For sports junkies, there’s an unlimited number of analysis and visualizations that can be done on the data. I took a quick break from packing to condense ... [Read more...]

Time Series as calendar heat maps + All of my running data since April 1, 2009 = Generated by the following code: #Sample Code based on example program at: source(file = "calendarHeat.R") run [Read more...]

At the JSM conference last week, I stopped by a great poster by Steve Salaga and Brian Mills, graduate students at University of Michigan's Department of Sport Management. The guys were clearly hockey fans, and had channelled their enthusiasm for a sport into an interesting statistical analysis of game and ... [Read more...]

Scrabble is a game that involves both skill and luck. There's skill in knowing the words you can play and — especially — the most advantageous ways to play them. But there's also luck in the tiles you draw randomly from the bag: get saddled with a rack containing four I's and ... [Read more...]

I was pleasantly surprised to have my recreational reading about baseball in the New Yorker interrupted by a digression on statistics. Sam Fuld of the Tampa Bay Rays, was the subjet of a Ben McGrath profile in the 4 July 2011 issue of the New Yorker, in an article titled Super Sam. ... [Read more...]

Google research scientist Peter Hauck used Weka and k-means cluster analysis to describe where Mariners right-fielder Ichiro favours hitting the baseball. He then used R to visualize the 6 clusters the k-means analysis identified: I sometimes find K-means clusting tough to explain as a statistical technique, but this makes for a ... [Read more...]

Are MLB players better hitters now than they were 20 years ago? Revolution Analytics' Joseph Rickert uses R to take a look at the data, and offers an instructive lesson in checking your assumptions for statistical tests in the process -- Ed. Data are everywhere – but, even for simple things, I ... [Read more...]

The words "statistics" and "baseball" are often found near each other, but there's a lot more to statistics than dividing the number of hits by the number of swings to get a batting average. And there's a lot more to sabermetrics -- the statistical analysis of baseball -- than averages, ... [Read more...]

ESPN's Bill Simmons (aka The Sports Guy) recently suggested that the primary cause of dwindling interest in Red Sox games by fans is that baseball games these days are too long. "It's not that fun to spend 30-45 minutes driving to a game, paying for parking, parking, waiting in line ... [Read more...]

Now that Spain has won the World Cup, it's interesting to go back and look at some metrics from the matches and see if we can tease out what characteristics made for a winning Cup team this time around. Fortunately, the Guardian's Data Blog has made a wealth of World ... [Read more...]

Here's another great example of R being used to analyze sports data. Statistician and skier Joran Elias has started a project to analyze and visualize international cross country ski racing results, and he publishes his analysis at the blog Statistical Skier. All of the analyses are done using R (and ... [Read more...]

PROS ARE NOT GETTING BETTER AT FREE THROWS Rick Larrick recently told Decision Science News that baseball players have been getting better over the years in a couple ways. First, home runs and strikeouts have increased. The careless or clueless reader might note that this is curious, for from the ... [Read more...]