Please find below details of meeting to be held on Wednesday 4th October.
Everybody welcome, please contact Ashley Jones for further details.



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Royal Statistical Society Merseyside Local Group meeting

Wednesday 4th October 2006  2.00pm-4.00pm
(Tea & Coffee in Common room afterwards, 3rd Floor)
Venue : Penthouse, Maths & Oceanography building University of Liverpool

Statistics in Sport
Please contact Ashley Jones ([log in to unmask]) for further details.

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Statistics and football - the Actim Index and forecasting international
match results with the aid of copulas.

Ian McHale (University of Salford)

Sport has often been used as a playground for Statisticians. From cricket
and baseball to American Football and athletics, statistical analysis has
been used for many purposes. In this talk the focus is on football. Two
areas of the speaker's research are presented. First, there is a look at
the Actim Index - the official player ratings system of the English Premier
League, devised by the speaker. We took a quantitative approach to
answering questions such as: who is the best player, Rooney or Henry; and,
if a statistician were the England coach, what would the England team look
like? Next, the talk considers the construction of a model for forecasting
results of internationals. The approach uses copula functions to generate
bivariate discrete distributions with more general dependence structures
than ones typically used in the past. The performance of the resulting
model is compared with that of standard forecasting techniques.


Statistics in Sports and Games

Frank C Duckworth (Editor RSS NEWS)

Most people think that the main contribution of statistics to sports and
games is in somehow manipulating the laws of probability to make money or
in devising optimum strategies for winnings.  However, there are many
sporting areas where the statistician's skill may be applied for the
benefit of the games themselves.  Examples will be given from the speaker's
own work on general knowledge quizzes and one-day cricket matches, and
other areas where statistical analysis may be able to give useful results
will be identified in sports ranging from association football to
synchronised swimming.

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