Computer System Makes Best Sports Bets

schliz writes to tell us that a new computer system using the "Logistic Regression Markov Chain" (LRMC) has proven to be the most efficient system at predicting sporting event outcomes. The system was tested on the 2008 US NCAA basketball season and picked all four of the finalists. "Similar to other rankings systems, LRMC uses the quality of each NCAA team's results and the strength of each team's schedule to rank teams. The method has been designed to use only basic scoreboard data, including which teams played, which team had home court advantage and the margin of victory."

RTFA

[sarahbau]

I know this is Slashdot, but why can't people RTFA before commenting? They aren't using the seeds or rankings in the program - only game stats, home quart advantage, etc. They ran it on the last 9 years of data and it picked final four teams 30% more often than analysts. (30/36 vs 23/36).

The linked article didn't mention it, but from the GA Tech web site, it said that it correctly identified several overrated teams that lost early on (like Georgetown), and underrated teams that went farther than expected (like WVU). The program picks Kansas to win this year.

Link to the paper

[yo]

Here is the paper describing the method: http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/people/faculty/Joel_Sokol/ncaa.pdf [gatech.edu]