2014 District Point Model Analysis

[MikeE]

There are some other interesting observations from analysis of the 2013 district events using the Unified District Points Model.

Perhaps the most interesting is the basic histogram of points per event. The 17 district events held during the 2013 season had the following distribution:



As expected this shows a multimodal distribution which roughly corresponds to one component for teams who don't make the eliminations (tall bump to the left) another broader component for teams receiving seeding points then a long tail for teams reaching the last stages of elimination.
This year there are 39 districts, a large jump from last year's 17 events so there will be more data and we'll get a better model of the underlying distribution..

The second observation is the impact of district size. From a team perspective the majority of points are given for seeding/elimination performance. These are always split between 24 teams that make the eliminations so at smaller events where the likelihood of getting to elims is higher there is a correspondingly higher average point score per team.

In 2013 the largest district had 43 teams and the smallest 31 with an average point score of 24.4 and 29.2 respectively. This year the spread in size across all Districts is even greater with the largest event at 45 teams (Bridgewater-Raritan in MAR) and smallest event at 28 teams (Mt Vernon in PNW). The expected points per team just based on event size would be 23.8 and 31.0 respectively.

The following table shows the expected (average) points for hypothetical teams attending the two smallest or two largest events in each of the Districts:

Dist  Smallest    pts   Largest    pts  Diff
MAR     33, 34   55.8    40, 40   49.1   6.6
PNW     28, 29   61.3    35, 35   54.4   6.9
FiM     31, 35   56.4    40, 40   50.6   5.8
NE      32, 33   56.7    40, 40   50.6   6.1

So choosing smaller events gives a 6 to 7 point advantage or almost as much as the rookie bonus.

Finally the graph below shows the average total points scored split by team qualification score.



It's not a surprise to see the points increase as a team wins more matches, but above 8 wins the average points per event grows far more quickly. Seeding points make a small difference but this is mostly due to the same observation as above that 70% of all district events were won by the top alliance (and every district event was won by a top 3 alliance).