Stat Chat for 24 Nov. 2009

Agenda

• 6:00 - 6:30, Dinner
• 6:30 - 6:40, Short report: Cindy Kaus (Metro State) Project SENCER
• 6:40 - 7:10, Journal club. Emery Brown and Robert Kass, What is Statistics? (The American Statistician 63(2):105-110) Link to article on ASA web site.
Paul Roback will moderate the discussion.
• 7:15 - 8:00, Main Event: Victor Addona A Course on Statistical Analysis of Sports and Games
  Victor will describe the course he is teaching this semester to first-year students. Here is the course description:
  In this course, we learn about the core descriptive, probabilistic, and inferential methods used in statistics. These topics will be motivated by using real data from a variety of sports. Quantitative analysis of sports data has become a serious research field. Baseball was the first North American sport to be studied by statisticians. The term coined by Bill James for this field, "sabermetrics", is widely recognized in the statistical community, and many professional sports teams now employ academic statisticians to help them gain an advantage over the competition. The acceptance of sabermetrics (aided by the popularity of books like Moneyball) has led to quantitative research in other sports, as objective decision making continues to replace the haphazard "gut feelings" used in the past.
  The plethora of examples that are sports related are not restricted to "traditional" sports data. For example, we will discuss data on the graduation rates, and birthdays(!), of athletes. As we will see, at the core of this course is a desire to answer questions of interest in impartial and meaningful ways. Ultimately, this is a statistics course, so we learn about different methods used to analyze data. But we will not lose sight of the fact that, in statistics, the final analysis is only one aspect of the process used to answer questions. For example, measurement issues are a crucial, but often overlooked, piece of the puzzle: What metric(s) should we use to decide which of two players is better? How do we assess strategies in a game?