It’s NCAA Tournament selection Sunday! As in past years, I am going to write a program to make my picks following two principles: code it fast and do something reasonable. I am ahead of the game this year – I’m done!
The approach I am using is a modified version of the Iterative Strength Rating as described on the Net Prophet blog. I am making two modifications:
- Incorporate margin of victory.
- Weight late-season games more than early-season games.
I ran a preliminary version of the code on games played through March 17 (note: post updated 3/18 to include games from the last week). The model seeds the teams as follows. Let’s see how close these seeds are to the actual ones released this afternoon!
| 1 | Louisville |
| 1 | Duke |
| 1 | Indiana |
| 1 | Miami FL |
| 2 | Kansas |
| 2 | Ohio State |
| 2 | Georgetown |
| 2 | Florida |
| 3 | Michigan |
| 3 | St Louis U. |
| 3 | Michigan St |
| 3 | New Mexico |
| 4 | Oklahoma St |
| 4 | Gonzaga |
| 4 | Marquette |
| 4 | Syracuse |
Nathan Brixius 
I just noticed the reference to my blog — thanks, and I’m glad you got something out of it! I’d be curious to see how you incorporated margin of victory, if you get a chance to write about it.
Please come join the Machine Madness competition: http://blog.smellthedata.com/
Thanks Scott! You’ve got a great blog with tons of interesting topics, and I appreciate your transparency and care in testing your results. I just joined the Machine Madness competition with my picks!
Great! I hope you lose to me 🙂
Magic 8-ball says it is likely that I will lose to you 😉
Hello just wanted to give you a quick heads up and let
you know a few of the images aren’t loading correctly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue.
I’ve tried it in two different browsers and both show the same results.