A Study of Techniques Used for Regression to the Mean Studies

While I was applying for a job in the NBA, my research kept leading me to people who said they were making their predictions using regression-to-the-mean.  This didn’t make sense to me, because they were not dealing with purely random statistics.  It is true that there is a degree of randomness to basketball statistics, most of which can be determined using binomial statistics, but there is also a significant amount of spread in the true abilities of the players.  So I wanted to look into exactly what people were doing, and how I would do it myself.  It turns out that there are a ton of different methods and so I didn’t cover them all, but looked at one of the main ones.  And I derived my own way of doing things.

All of my work is summarized in this paper.  I may convert the whole thing into a blog post later, but for now you can just check out the pdf.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *