paper: Weeks 1-2 Elo Analysis

[Michael Hill]

I think there are quite a few biases still because of the way we do regionals/districts. Teams that only compete in a week 1 or 2 regional and do well (but not well enough to go to championship), will be rated artificially high because the only teams they're compared against are the other teams at the regional who still have the default rating. There is no opportunity to mark them down later on if they don't compete again (but other teams from that regional do). What would be possible is to use results from prior years as well, but shift them toward the mean at the beginning of each season. This would account for good teams tend to consistently be good teams (to paraphrase Jim Zondag). This sort of thing is done in the Elo rankings of NFL teams by Nate Silver (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/i...l-elo-ratings/) There are some other things we can take away from Silver as well. For example, we could possibly modify the algorithm to weigh eliminations more than the qualifications, something that's also done in the World Football Elo Ratings. See this wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_F...n_princ iples Basically, the K value (the factor that determins how much to change a participating team's elo rating) is modified based on how important a match is.