All Things Data Science

Forget Paul the Octopus, Chanakya the Fish, and all other football predicting animals. It appears that the stock market can be used to predict the outcome of  football matches!  Now that the stock markets are not doing so well, at least we can use them to make a few bucks on football betting sites. Take last weekend's game, for instance, when Germany played Greece. It turns out that the score evolution of this game followed a very similar pattern than the German Greek spread from half March to half June 2012. The pattern is obvious in the graph below. The correlation between the two series is an impressive 93%. The attentive reader will notice that there is a gap between the 45 and 60 minutes marks. Indeed the stock markets predicted that the third and fourth German goals would have been scored earlier. Specialists are investigating whether this has to do with the break after the first half . But, other than that small gap, the fit between the two lines is very close. These resu

Currently there is a debate in Belgium about the construction of Uplace, a huge shopping mall on the outskirts of Brussels. A marketing professor of the Vlerick School, Gino Van Ossel, did a survey which showed that, contrary to popular believe, quite a big group was actually in favor rather than opposing the plans. So far so good, but the professor's methodology was questioned in the media. The arguments used against the survey findings were not very strong, I believe, and I will not discuss them here. However, a part of the reasoning used by Gino Van Ossel looked rather odd to me and made me think about a more general problem that I would like to discuss here. Those of you who understand Dutch can find all the details on www.marketingblog.vlerick.com . In short, he found that in a sample of 654, representing the total Belgium, 33% was in favor, while in the region where the shopping mall would located, with a sample of 182, 46% were in favor. This was against the popular believ