In this post, we will look at a simple probability model for winning a tennis game. This model is far too simple to be accurate in predicting real tennis matches, but it will be the starting point for building more useful models. It is also a good introduction to some of the more advanced counting techniques used to analyze probability.
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Month: December 2017
Web Scraping NBA Team Matchups and Box Scores
We are going to use machine learning and statistics to predict NBA matchups. To do this, we are going to need data on NBA games, and lots of it. So let’s get all the team matchups and box scores from stats.nba.com, and make them ready for use.
This post has two purposes. The first is to show you how to do the actual web scraping. The second purpose is to show you how to examine data before you us it. Data are almost always a bit messy and need to be handled with care. It’s important to take some time to look at data and to make sure it’s clean before use.
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Analyzing the Board Game Risk
I enjoy playing the game Risk with my family. The game provides a nice balance of strategy and chance. The pace of play is good and the rules are easy to remember.
In Risk, you win the game by attacking and conquering your opponents’ territories with your armies. Since the game uses up to 5 dice to determine the outcome of each attack, chance is an unavoidable part of the game. The main tool players have to control chance is to position their armies wisely, and attack when the odds are in their favor.
This post shows you how to use the probability tools from this site to analyze the odds in Risk, so you can make better decisions and hopefully improve your chances of winning.
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Coin Flips and Multiplying Probabilities
In this post, we will look at coin flips to see how to analyze outcomes which depend on more than one source of randomness. These are called joint events and have joint probability distributions. We will see how you combine the probabilities of simpler events to create joint probabilities by multiplication.
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Some Suggestions for Learning (or Improving your) Python
This post offers a few suggestions for those of you who might want to get up to speed using Python or to upgrade your skills. There are a huge number of resources out there. Hopefully this will help you choose where to start.
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Probability Distributions and Dice Rolls
This post builds on the previous post on probability modeling in Python. In this post, we will discuss the concept of probability distribution and how to represent it in Python.
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