An improvement to OPR

[Ether]

My preferred solution is for FIRST to move to an all district model with 12 matches per event and therefore no more surrogates

The criterion for "no surrogates" is M*6/T = N, where

M is the number of qual matches
T is the number of teams
N is a whole number (the number of matches played by each team)

At CMP, T=100 and M=134, so N was not a whole number; thus there were surrogates.

If instead T=96 and M=128, N would be a whole number (namely 8) and there would be no surrogates.

Since there is a single surrogate team in an alliance we just need to add the Twitter component scores to their "Team Standing" score to get the corrected total scores for that surrogate team.

Here's the 2013 season Twitter data for elim and qual matches. It has Archi, Curie, Galileo, & Newton. The usual Twitter data caveats apply.

I've been playing around with maximum likelihood estimate models as an alternative (really an extension) to OPR...

What do you mean by "maximum likelihood estimate models" in this context?

One more point: I'm a fan of the binary matrix approach...

In this context, I'm assuming "the binary matrix" refers to the 2MxN design matrix [A] of the overdetermined system.

Do you then use QR factorization directly on the binary matrix to obtain the solution, or do you form the normal equations and use Cholesky?