The week that defeated the NBA predictor… \(24/49 = 49.0%\). That’s right, worse than a coin flip. Not exactly the Christmas present we had in mind. We certainly weren’t expecting things to be this bad, but Christmas week is extremely difficult to predict, historically. It’s not like our algorithm went crazy or anything, everything still looks sane, we still put the 76ers at terrible and the Warriors at awesome. Of course, that didn’t help us much when the former beat the Heat and the latter lost to the Lakers. Utah over Memphis and New Orleans over OKC are a couple more head-scratchers. I know, I know, more excuses, but seriously, this is well below our estimated range of plausible results (see comments here). This deserves an explanation - we are investigating, more to come on the NBA grinch that stole our Christmas.
In the meantime, a hopefully much better set of predictions for week 8 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.