Thread: Calculating based on record

Greetings,

I run a fantasy football league and I would like to put a chart on our website that shows the odds of a making the playoffs based off a teams record in any given week.

For example (and I am going to just randomly make up percents)

Week 1	%Chance	Week 2	%Chance	Week 3	%Chance	Week 14	%Chance
1-0	60%	2-0	62.3%	3-0	72.5%	14-0	100%
0-1	40%	1-1	36.8%	2-1	52.8%	...	...
		0-2	12.32%	1-2	49.7%	...	...
				0-3	11.4%	0-14	0%

I have the ability to query our database to find all the people who have made the playoffs and what their record was each week, but I have no idea how to go about figuring out how to compute all the chances.

Any help would be appreciated

Hey heraldic2.

You will need a conditional distribution that gives a model that given a prior score, you will get a new score and this model is known as Markov Modelling. It's a fancy of saying that the next outcome only depends on the outcome that came before it and nothing else (for each outcome).

This is a more general model taking into account the performance of the last game to update the probability but if you want to consider that each probability of winning (or losing) is the same for each game then this is called a Binomial model where this gives you a probability for winning X games in N attempts.

Both are very different approaches with different assumptions and you will need to decide what those assumptions are.

Thank you Chiro,

I choose computers over math so it might take me several hours with a dictionary, google and a crystal ball to try to understand the words you put down. However it appears that I have two choices and that I need to research both choices to see which one offers the closest assumptions to this situation.

Thanks again!