All Things Data Science

As a data scientist I'm always happy when a newspaper spends time in explaining something from the field of Statistics. The Guardian is one of those newspapers that does a very good job at that. @alexbellos often contributes to the Guardian and I must say I often like the stuff he writes. Just recently he wrote a piece entitled " World Cup birthday paradox: footballers born on the same day ", which was taken over by the Belgian quality newspaper De Standaard. The headline there was " Verbazend veel WK-voetballers zijn samen jarig ", which roughly translates to "Surprisingly many Word Cup players share birthdays". Notice already that the headline in De Standaard is less subtle than the one in The Guardian. Alex Bellos starts with explaning what the birthday paradox is: The birthday paradox is the surprising mathematical result that you only need 23 people in order for it to be more likely than not that two of them share the same birthday. He then ...

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...