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.