677,482 research outputs found
Seeking Excellence: Improving Objectivity in Player Analysis in Professional Basketball
This thesis details the creation and testing of an original statistical metric for analyzing individual basketball players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) by both their commonly measured statistics and their so-called “intangibles.” By using existing methods as both guides and a caution against potential shortcomings, an inclusive statistic with multiple layers of data can be built to best reflect an individual player’s overall value to his team. This metric will be adjusted to account for the differences across multiple eras of NBA play and the levels of talent with which a player played in order to avoid penalizing a player for the unique aspects of his career
A Taxonomy of Big Data for Optimal Predictive Machine Learning and Data Mining
Big data comes in various ways, types, shapes, forms and sizes. Indeed,
almost all areas of science, technology, medicine, public health, economics,
business, linguistics and social science are bombarded by ever increasing flows
of data begging to analyzed efficiently and effectively. In this paper, we
propose a rough idea of a possible taxonomy of big data, along with some of the
most commonly used tools for handling each particular category of bigness. The
dimensionality p of the input space and the sample size n are usually the main
ingredients in the characterization of data bigness. The specific statistical
machine learning technique used to handle a particular big data set will depend
on which category it falls in within the bigness taxonomy. Large p small n data
sets for instance require a different set of tools from the large n small p
variety. Among other tools, we discuss Preprocessing, Standardization,
Imputation, Projection, Regularization, Penalization, Compression, Reduction,
Selection, Kernelization, Hybridization, Parallelization, Aggregation,
Randomization, Replication, Sequentialization. Indeed, it is important to
emphasize right away that the so-called no free lunch theorem applies here, in
the sense that there is no universally superior method that outperforms all
other methods on all categories of bigness. It is also important to stress the
fact that simplicity in the sense of Ockham's razor non plurality principle of
parsimony tends to reign supreme when it comes to massive data. We conclude
with a comparison of the predictive performance of some of the most commonly
used methods on a few data sets.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures 3 table
Bayesian astrostatistics: a backward look to the future
This perspective chapter briefly surveys: (1) past growth in the use of
Bayesian methods in astrophysics; (2) current misconceptions about both
frequentist and Bayesian statistical inference that hinder wider adoption of
Bayesian methods by astronomers; and (3) multilevel (hierarchical) Bayesian
modeling as a major future direction for research in Bayesian astrostatistics,
exemplified in part by presentations at the first ISI invited session on
astrostatistics, commemorated in this volume. It closes with an intentionally
provocative recommendation for astronomical survey data reporting, motivated by
the multilevel Bayesian perspective on modeling cosmic populations: that
astronomers cease producing catalogs of estimated fluxes and other source
properties from surveys. Instead, summaries of likelihood functions (or
marginal likelihood functions) for source properties should be reported (not
posterior probability density functions), including nontrivial summaries (not
simply upper limits) for candidate objects that do not pass traditional
detection thresholds.Comment: 27 pp, 4 figures. A lightly revised version of a chapter in
"Astrostatistical Challenges for the New Astronomy" (Joseph M. Hilbe, ed.,
Springer, New York, forthcoming in 2012), the inaugural volume for the
Springer Series in Astrostatistics. Version 2 has minor clarifications and an
additional referenc
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