World Cup Forecasting Challenge For Quants

databuff writes "As a break from projecting the strength of subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, and other obscure financial instruments, quantitative analysts at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS, and Danske Bank have modeled the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Now Kaggle has set up a forecasting competition, allowing statisticians to go head-to-head with these corporate giants. The challenge is to predict how far each country will progress in the tournament."

Comments

Bias

[bloodhawk]

There are numerous problems here.

Firstly is very few fans of football can truly consider themselves independent enough to do this well. I will try, but I just know my bias's will in the end have some effect on the outcome of my selections.

Secondly it isn't just about stats at something like the world cup where there are very few second chances and It is a game where you can completely dominate the opposition and still lose to a single error or bad ref decision.

Re:Bias

[aBaldrich]

Here in Argentina we use to say that statistics are like miniskirts: they give you a nice idea, but hide the most important things.

Re:For the record...

[SoVeryTired]

I'm not sure the distinction you are using. Quants predict nothing. They are used to see which companies appear undervalued, and thus would be good values (and not in the sense of a value vs growth company). They are also used to determine which appear overpriced.

I think that's more like a financial analyst. A quant typically works one level of abstraction away from the stock market itself, calculating prices and hedging strategies for stock options or credit default swaps, say.

I know there's a lot of anti-quant sentiment around at the moment, and this being slashdot, I'd like to add a disclaimer: I'm just trying to describe the job that a quant does in theory. I'm not making any statement about whether the methods they use at present are effective. Please keep that in mind before flaming me.