This was an odd week in the NBA - plenty of upsets to go around. You’re right, we’re making excuses - our NBA predictor had a tough week this round. We had a total accuracy of 27/50 = 54%. The summary by point spread is at right. But seriously, who would have predicted results like back-to-back Laker victories over Atlanta and Houston (aside from die-hard Kobe fans)? Well, we certainly didn’t.
For the coming week we have further refined our algorithm in two ways. First, we have now incorporated a team’s away performance into their predicted home performance and vice-versa. And second, we now select the parameters from our model with a more thorough and systematic cross-validation method. Predictions are now up!
Dustin got a B.S in Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines (Golden, CO) before moving to UC Santa Barbara for graduate school. There he became interested in Soft Condensed Matter Physics and Polymer Physics, studying the interaction between single DNA molecules and salt ions. After a brief postdoc at UC San Diego studying the physics of bacterial growth, Dustin decided to move into the data science business for good - he is now a Quantitative Analyst at Google in Mountain View.