BS: Predicting Salt Lake medal count

Subject: Predicting Salt Lake medal count
From: Wolfgang
Date: 26 Feb 02 - 06:32 AM

I love to look at predictions, especially after the fact. Harvard scientists have predicted the Salt Lake City Olympics medal count by an economic model explicitely not taking into account any sports knowledge but looking at economic factors and length of winter etc. Here's what they had predicted:
click and scroll a bit

Now that we know the result we can check how good their model is. One easy way is to compare the model's results with a primitive 'model' without any math in it. The first model that came to my mind is 'everything stays the same'. That means I 'predict' that each country will repeat last Olympics' result.

One obvious bit of sports knowledge should be taken into account: The host country will do much better than last or next time (a cursory glance at each medal count across Olympic games will show that to be true), due to a mixture of better motivation of athletes and pressure on judges by audience acclamation in many events.

So if we simply disregard the USA results instead of making an ad hoc allowance for hosting advantage we can compare the economists' model and the 'everything stays the same model' with the actual results (you'll find them at many places). We now see that last Olympics' results were at the very least not a worse predictor of the results in Salt Lake City than a complicated model.

As long as a primitive model is as good a predictor as a model with a lot of math I prefer the primitive model.

That reminds me when in the Netherlands a panel of experts predicted the football results for one season and their performance was compared to a 'model' that did nothing else but predict each single time a win of the home team the 'model' did better than any of the experts.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BS: Predicting Salt Lake medal count
From: greg stephens
Date: 26 Feb 02 - 06:36 AM

I predict that McGrath of Harlow will have an opinion on this subject. I have used quite a primtive non-mathematical model for this prediction, so it will be interesting to see if it works.

Subject: RE: BS: Predicting Salt Lake medal count
From: GUEST,Nigel Parsons
Date: 26 Feb 02 - 07:30 AM

Of course McG of H may decide not to respond just to shown the poor construction of your model! Or, if he is being awkward he might log in as a guest to put a point across

Subject: RE: BS: Predicting Salt Lake medal count
From: greg stephens
Date: 26 Feb 02 - 07:34 AM

yes, nigel parsons is a pretty unconvinving nom-de-plume. i think my model is working fine.

Subject: RE: BS: Predicting Salt Lake medal count
From: GUEST,Nigel Parsons
Date: 26 Feb 02 - 08:10 AM

Unfortunately Nigel Parsons is the name I'm stuck with, not a nom-de-plume (nom-de-keyboard?). So far I see no response from McG, so your second post seems to be trying to tempt him out to respond, thus making your prophecy self-fulfilling. Or are you a nom-de-plme of McG ??