I have to apologize to anyone who Stole My Entry over on Kaggle, because the Net Prophet predictor has made a hash of it this Tournament, and is mired low in the Leaderboard and well below the median entry. A number of the upsets have been very improbable according to the Net Prophet predictor and it has suffered accordingly.
It's worth noting that some others have been suffering too: Monte McNair has done better than Net Prophet but not by a whole lot. Ken Massey entered for the first time and is very low on the Leaderboard (apparently because he gambled rather heavily on 2-15 matchups). The most interesting story is ShiningMGF, who started poorly (perhaps because their first-round predictions are influenced by the Vegas lines?) but have been climbing steadily and are now in tenth place. Top Ten finishes three years running is almost certainly a good indication that they know something the rest of us don't!
Over at the Machine Madness contest, Net Prophet isn't doing any better, being one of the many entries that predicted Kansas as the eventual champion. It looks like "SDSU" has the win locked up already. "Predict the Madness" is likely to finish second unless North Carolina loses the next game. Beyond that it gets a little murky, but all the entries with UNC winning it all have an obvious advantage.
But regardless of who wins, it's been a great turnout for the contest (40 entries!) and I want to give my sincere thanks to everyone who entered. It's really great to see so much interest and participation!
I've been looking at MGF's entries and it seems the two entries are identical on 'uncertain' games and then every other game is given a zero in one entry and a one in the other. I was under the impression that assigning a 0 or 1 and getting it wrong would essentially break your entry with an NA value, so there's something about the mechanics of the rules I must be misunderstanding.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting observation. On their blog (http://statsinthewild.com/2016/03/28/one-shining-mgf-so-so-so-so-lucky/) they comment that the SFA-Notre Dame game almost sunk them, so maybe they had a very high probability assigned to that game. I should take a look at their entries.
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