Posted April 28, 2010 Atlanta, GA
While Duke was crowned the victor in the NCAA men's basketball national championship this month, another big winner emerged: the Georgia Tech LRMC method for predicting NCAA tournament outcomes.
The new Bayesian LRMC method – an updated version of the previous system – correctly predicted the winner of more games during this year's tournament than all other ranking systems tracked on BCS computer ranker Ken Massey's website, masseyratings.com, which analyzes predictions for various sporting events.
Bayesian LRMC finished three full games ahead of the field, which included
well-known rankings such as the Associated Press and
USA Today polls, the NCAA's Ratings Percentage Index, Pomeroy,
Sagarin and Massey's own computer ranking methods. Bayesian LRMC was
the only ranking to correctly predict the winner of more than 50 games.
In addition to Bayesian LRMC's first place finish, the original LRMC method
finished in a three-way tie for second place with 48 correct predictions.
A correct prediction was defined as the winner of a game being ranked
higher than the game's loser.
This is the second recent success for the system. In 2008, the LRMC correctly
predicted the winner of every game in the final three rounds of the NCAA
tournament before the tournament started.
The LRMC method was first developed by Professors Paul Kvam and Joel Sokol at
Georgia Tech's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems
Engineering (ISyE). The LRMC team has since expanded to include ISyE
professor George Nemhauser and City College of New York mathematics
professor Mark Brown.
A mathematical description of Bayesian LRMC is forthcoming in the Journal
of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the world's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities and the eighth best engineering and information technology university in the world by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, Georgia Tech’s more than 20,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and minority engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
