Bryan Nelson

Defense Date

6-20-2012

Graduation Date

2012

Availability

Immediate Access

Submission Type

thesis

Degree Name

MS

Department

Computational Mathematics

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Committee Chair

Eric Ruggieri

Committee Member

John Kern

Committee Member

Stacey Levine

Keywords

Bayesian, Logistic regression, MCMC, NCAA

Abstract

Many rating systems exist that order the Division I teams in Men's College Basketball that compete in the NCAA Tournament, such as seeding teams on an S-curve, and the Pomeroy and Sagarin ratings, simplifying the process of choosing winners to a comparison of two numbers. Rather than creating a rating system, we analyze each matchup by using the difference between the teams' individual regular season statistics as the independent variables. We use an MCMC approach and logistic regression along with several model selection techniques to arrive at models for predicting the winner of each game. When given the 63 actual games in the 2012 tournament, eight of our models performed as well as Pomeroy's rating system and four did as well as Sagarin's rating system when given the 63 actual games. Not allowing the models to fix their mistakes resulted in only one model outperforming both Pomeroy and Sagarin's systems.

Format

PDF

Language

English

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