DailyDirt: Digging Into Sports Statistics

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Baseball fans have been fascinated with player statistics for a really, really long time. Sabermetrics changed a few things about baseball in recent years, so it's about time other sports started looking into more rigorous data analysis, too. Fantasy team managers and actual professional coaches are both looking for diamond-in-the-rough players, and more player statistics are being collected and analyzed to find them. Here are just a few interesting developments in the field of performance analysis.

• Looking at the stats for 452 NBA players, there are far more than the five traditional positions in basketball -- try 13 different kinds of players. The 'Paint Protector' position gets more fouls than shots and collects rebounds like crazy. The 'Scoring Rebounder' might be a more highly-paid player, though. [url]
• The NBA wants to provide more engaging statistics to its fans, so it's turned to enterprise software solutions -- SAP HANA. Will re-purposed business analytics software be able to appeal to millions of fans? [url]
• The PageRank algorithm can be applied to soccer players, based on how many passes a player receives from his teammates, to help analyze how players fit into a team and quantify the overall strength of a team. Obviously, this algorithm has several limitations, but soccer isn't as statistic-friendly as other sports, so data analysis strategies for soccer are not as well developed. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: analytics, basketball, data, pagerank, sabermetrics, soccer, sports
Companies: nba, sap

PageRank Useful In Stopping The Spread Of Infections?

from the it's-useful-everywhere-but-search dept

There have been a number of stories recently about how Google's famed "PageRank" system is in less and less use at the company these days. Still, that doesn't mean the concept isn't being used elsewhere. Last year we wrote about how some researchers were using it to better understand how brains work in a way that could be useful for artificial intelligence work. And, now, there's a report saying that researchers are using the concept of PageRank to try to stem staph infections at hospitals. Google's founders have been known to dabble in a variety of other interests beyond search -- perhaps they should be leading the charge to apply PageRank to other arenas.

Filed Under: pagerank, staph infections

Google's PageRank Works Like Our Brains

from the what's-your-brainrank? dept

We've joked in the past about how Google effectively acts as a a secondary or "backup" brain for many people. However, perhaps it wasn't so much of a joke. New research on how human memory and recall works suggests that the process is quite similar to Google's PageRank in determining what things are more important and should be recalled first. Basically, Google's PageRank looks at "popularity," not just in terms of how many links a site gets, but also in terms of how popular those links are. Thus, if you get linked from a more popular site, that's more valuable than getting linked by a bunch of non-popular sites. It turns out that the brain does something similar in linking concepts, judging not just the popularity, but the popularity of the concepts linked to the concepts. In fact, using Google's PageRank turned out to be a better predictor of how a brain would prioritize words than more commonly known methods.

This could be an interesting finding for the artificial intelligence community. After all, many in the AI community have been trying to figure out how to make computers act more like human brains for years, and various brute force methods haven't worked all that well. Obviously, the AI world has worked on various neural net research for quite some time, but it's nice to see at least some confirmation from the psychology side concerning a way to match up brains and algorithms. A couple years ago, we noted that intelligence was often correlated to people who knew what to forget rather than trying to remember everything. What that really shows is that good brains are better at prioritizing and ranking the importance of something -- and that's exactly what PageRank is intended to do. So, now, we just need Larry Page to get back from his honeymoon and get to work on BrainRank. Or would that be PageBrain? Of course, it's also worth noting that with the rise of search engine spamming, rumor has it that Google doesn't use PageRank that much any more. Perhaps that just means that our brains are vulnerable to concept spamming as well...

Filed Under: brains, memory, pagerank, psychology, recall
Companies: google