Statistical Predictions

[MikeE]

Originally Posted by Basel A

I've been doing it for several years, and this year it's been the worst by far. The game could hardly be more interdependent, which makes any OPR-based predictions bunk. Also, I should note that I've generally found Most Recent OPR to be a better predictor than Max OPR.

Basel gets at the core of the issue for this year's game. The independence assumption inherent in OPR-like regressions doesn't model a game where a plurality of points scored are from cooperation between alliance members.
Unfortunately the data from matches is too sparse to model interactions between specific teams, so we would have to use more advanced techniques (e.g. clustering teams into equivalence classes) which brings an additional set of approximations.