gilgamath

## Lego Pricing.

Mon 06 March 2017 by Steven E. Pav

It is time to get kiddo a new Lego set, as he's been on a bender this week, building everything he can get his hands on. I wanted to optimize play time per dollar spent, so I set out to look for Lego pricing data.

## Odds of Winning Your Oscar Pool.

Mon 30 January 2017 by Steven E. Pav

In a previous blog post, I used a Bradley-Terry model to analyze Oscar Best Picture winners, using the best picture dataset. In that post I presented the results of likelihood tests which showed 'significant' relationships between winning the Best Picture category and conomination for other awards, MovieLens ratings, and (spuriously) number of IMDb votes. It can be hard to interpret the effect sizes and $$t$$ statistics from a Bradley-Terry model. So here I will try to estimate the probability of correctly guessing the Best Picture winner using this model.

There is no apparent direct translation from the coefficients of the model fit to the probability of correctly forecasting a winner. Nor can you transform the maximized likelihood, or an R-squared. Moreover, it will depend on the number of nominees (traditionally there were only 5 Best Picture nominations--these days it's upwards of 9), and how they differ in the independent variables. Here I will keep it simple and use cross validation.

I modified the oslm code to include a predict method. So here, I load the data and the code, and remove duplicates and restrict the data to the period after 1945. I construct the model formula, based on co-nomination, then test in three ways:

• A purely 'in sample' validation where all the data are used to build the model, then tested. (The film with the highest forecast probability of winning is chosen as the predicted winner, of course.) This should give the most optimistic view of performance, even though the likelihood maximization problem does not directly select for this metric.
• A walk-forward cross validation where the data up through year $$y-1$$ are used to build the model, then it is used to forecast the winners in year $$y$$. This is perhaps the most honest kind of cross validation for ...

## Predicting Best Picture Winners.

Thu 26 January 2017 by Steven E. Pav

In a previous blog post, I described some data I had put together for predicting winners in the Best Picture category of the Oscars. Here I will use a Bradley-Terry model to describe this dataset.

## Best Picture?

Sun 22 January 2017 by Steven E. Pav

For a brief time I found myself working in the field of film analytics. One of our mad scientist type projects at the time was trying to predict which films might win an award. As a training exercise, we decided to analyze the Oscars.