{"id":35,"date":"2015-01-04T17:57:43","date_gmt":"2015-01-04T17:57:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/?p=35"},"modified":"2015-01-04T17:57:43","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T17:57:43","slug":"football-and-politics-or-combining-data-types-and-qualitative-and-quantitative-research-for-robust-predictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"Football and Politics – or – combining data types and qualitative and quantitative research for robust predictions"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, this blog has been pretty dormant for a while now, but a New Year (in capitals, so it must be new) and a new intention to actually do something with the blog. I\u2019m going to post a number of articles based on a talk I was asked to give a few years ago \u2013 about combining diverse data to make better predictions<\/a>. Essentially I am interested in this from a conservation management approach \u2013 how can we incorporate local knowledge, qualitative research and diverse quantitative measures into meaningful predictions to successfully manage and protect ecosystems. However, the two examples I\u2019m going to work on are not in this area at all: they are 1) predicting the general election result, and 2) predicting which football teams will qualify for Europe in this year\u2019s premier league. I don\u2019t really know much about either \u2013 which probably is good to avoid bias creeping in. There may be a few mistakes in what I say, but really it is all about quantifying data in the same way, and I don\u2019t really care about the predictions\u2026
\nTo combine data types, I\u2019m going to use Bayesian Belief networks, or minor modifications of these \u2013 see here <\/a>and here<\/a>, and my previous post here<\/a>. However, it is important to understand the basics of these first. Essentially you need to know the certainty of a given event occurring (this certainty then becomes modified by other interacting activities). However, the certainty of something happening isn\u2019t always obvious. For example, in my premiership football example, I have a league table and some rankings and points of different teams \u2013 but let\u2019s ask a specific question. What is the probability of any given team qualifying for Europe (Champions league to be precise)? To do this, they need to finish in the top four places. How do I infer that from points or rankings at the moment (5 months before the end of the season)? How can I then modify this, based on expert opinion and so on? I\u2019m going to work through examples of this as I have the time to work on them \u2013 but the aim is to have robust predictions based on data already available today (4th Jan 2015), even if it is February or March by the time I get around to finishing the predictions. So, first up, how to calculate my hard, quantitative priors for the Premiership\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, this blog has been pretty dormant for a while now, but a New Year (in capitals, so it must be new) and a new intention to actually do something with the blog. I\u2019m going to post a number of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/37"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.rickstafford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}