Saturday, October 31, 2009

Got Math? Part Two: The Consequences

In an earlier post, we explored the remarkable similarities between our RWFL rankings posted on Kenneth Massey's comparisons page, using our selected p=0.75 bias value, and Eugene Potemkin's E-Ratings. Through completely independent rationalizations, we ended up at equivalent linear algebra problems that we each solved to reach our rankings.

Well, this didn't seem to be adding much value to the comparisons, so Kenneth nicely asked me if we would do something to make sure ours were unique. So we're going to tweak our algorithm used to bring you weekly rankings, though we're going to do so in a logically consistent way. From now on, we're going to bring you the RWFL rankings as obtained by running the algorithm on the full set of 716 connected college football teams that include the FBS (that is, including all the FCS and DivII schools that play against the FBS, and all the schools who play them, etc.), and we'll report the ordered results from the FBS. This isn't actually "new" per se for us, as these are the rankings we've been using for our bowl predictions the past two years, because we think in principle they should be better. We just didn't want to spring a change without a compelling reason; needing to do something distinct from the E-Ratings is certainly a good enough reason.

If you decide you liked the old RWFL run on the FBS plus a single made-up catch-all non-FBS team, don't worry: you can still see those as the E-Ratings in Massey's comparisons. Indeed, comparing and contrasting the two should be interesting, in that the difference is all because of the treatment of the non-FBS teams, emphasizing the follow-on indirect effects present in the rankings.

An interesting part about this switch has to do with the only other change we've ever made in our rankings. Back in the original days of the Random Walker rankings, when all of us involved were all still at Georgia Tech, our "RW" rankings were just the linear algebra problem described in our manuscripts (which you can reach quickly from the sidebar), describing walkers with first-place votes. As noted at the end of our American Mathematical Monthly paper, there were a lot of reasons to expect improvement using this along with a second set of walkers, with last-place votes. For years, we've simply subtracted these second vote counts from the first to give the RWFL rankings ("Random Walkers First-Last").

But on the whole connected network of 716 teams, very little total weight of those last-place votes ends up in the FBS at all, so the rankings of the FBS teams are only very slightly modified by the last-place piece. One might argue that it would be more interesting to look at ratios instead of differences between the first-place and last-place votes, but that's not something we're going to do without some mathematical and computational investigation first.

Without further ado, as a means of comparison, let's back up to the beginning of the week (not just so we can relive the Carolina victory over Virginia Tech). The rankings listed below with the full connected set of teams definitely differs in some places from the old, simpler setting.

2009 Random Walker Rankings (RWFL, p=0.75)
Games through Saturday October 24th:
1. Iowa (8-0) [1.5817]
2. Florida (7-0) [1.5259]
3. Alabama (8-0) [1.5150]
4. Boise St (7-0) [1.1477]
5. TCU (7-0) [1.1042]
6. Southern Cal (6-1) [1.0839]
7. Oregon (6-1) [1.0780]
8. Texas (7-0) [1.0615]
9. LSU (6-1) [1.0351]
10. Georgia Tech (7-1) [1.0196]
11. Cincinnati (7-0) [0.9606]
12. Virginia Tech (5-2) [0.8658]
13. Arizona (5-2) [0.8354]
14. Penn State (7-1) [0.7979]
15. Miami FL (5-2) [0.7636]
16. Notre Dame (5-2) [0.7396]
17. South Carolina (6-2) [0.7216]
18. Pittsburgh (7-1) [0.7082]
19. Houston (6-1) [0.7080]
20. Oklahoma St (6-1) [0.6849]
21. Ohio State (6-2) [0.6686]
22. West Virginia (6-1) [0.6671]
23. Wisconsin (5-2) [0.6599]
24. California (5-2) [0.6102]
25. Utah (6-1) [0.5987]
26. Clemson (4-3) [0.5983]
27. Washington (3-5) [0.5971]
28. Georgia (4-3) [0.5816]
29. Kentucky (4-3) [0.5785]
30. Central Michigan (7-1) [0.5483]
31. Stanford (5-3) [0.5317]
32. Auburn (5-3) [0.5246]
33. Mississippi (5-2) [0.5227]
34. Michigan (5-3) [0.5090]
35. Oregon St (4-3) [0.5085]
36. Brigham Young (6-2) [0.4973]
37. Arkansas (3-4) [0.4728]
38. Kansas (5-2) [0.4617]
39. Navy (6-2) [0.4476]
40. Tennessee (3-4) [0.4473]
41. Boston College (5-3) [0.4472]
42. Troy (5-2) [0.4423]
43. Idaho (6-2) [0.4359]
44. Michigan St (4-4) [0.4309]
45. South Florida (5-2) [0.4255]
46. Oklahoma (4-3) [0.4157]
47. UCLA (3-4) [0.4119]
48. Arizona St (4-3) [0.4097]
49. Fresno St (4-3) [0.4068]
50. Iowa St (5-3) [0.3971]
51. Minnesota (4-4) [0.3863]
52. Nebraska (4-3) [0.3834]
53. Florida St (3-4) [0.3770]
54. Texas Tech (5-3) [0.3711]
55. Kansas St (5-3) [0.3708]
56. Marshall (5-3) [0.3688]
57. Missouri (4-3) [0.3631]
58. Virginia (3-4) [0.3422]
59. Wake Forest (4-4) [0.3391]
60. Rutgers (5-2) [0.3358]
61. Temple (5-2) [0.3357]
62. Mississippi St (3-5) [0.3356]
63. UTEP (3-4) [0.3356]
64. Nevada (4-3) [0.3286]
65. North Carolina (4-3) [0.3278]
66. Connecticut (4-3) [0.3232]
67. Purdue (3-5) [0.3231]
68. Louisiana-Monroe (4-3) [0.3146]
69. Duke (4-3) [0.3062]
70. SMU (3-4) [0.2991]
71. Texas A&M (4-3) [0.2976]
72. East Carolina (4-3) [0.2973]
73. North Carolina St (3-4) [0.2907]
74. Louisiana-Lafayette (4-3) [0.2842]
75. Colorado St (3-5) [0.2837]
76. Northern Illinois (4-3) [0.2814]
77. Southern Miss (5-3) [0.2748]
78. Wyoming (4-3) [0.2716]
79. Ohio U. (5-3) [0.2709]
80. Colorado (2-5) [0.2703]
81. Northwestern (5-3) [0.2684]
82. Air Force (4-4) [0.2677]
83. Bowling Green (3-5) [0.2592]
84. Syracuse (3-4) [0.2571]
85. Middle Tennessee St (4-3) [0.2457]
86. Toledo (4-4) [0.2452]
87. Western Michigan (4-4) [0.2379]
88. Indiana (4-4) [0.2353]
89. Tulsa (4-3) [0.2344]
90. Washington St (1-6) [0.2296]
91. Baylor (3-4) [0.2288]
92. Louisville (2-5) [0.2238]
93. Central Florida (4-3) [0.2203]
94. San Jose St (1-5) [0.2175]
95. San Diego St (3-4) [0.2165]
96. Arkansas St (2-4) [0.2080]
97. Buffalo (3-5) [0.2024]
98. Florida Atlantic (2-4) [0.2010]
99. Maryland (2-6) [0.1958]
100. Hawai`i (2-5) [0.1819]
101. Kent St (4-4) [0.1814]
102. UNLV (3-5) [0.1725]
103. Louisiana Tech (3-4) [0.1615]
104. Alabama-Birmingham (2-5) [0.1571]
105. Tulane (2-5) [0.1545]
106. Vanderbilt (2-6) [0.1516]
107. Utah St (2-5) [0.1453]
108. New Mexico St (3-5) [0.1423]
109. Memphis (2-5) [0.1413]
110. Illinois (1-6) [0.1366]
111. North Texas (1-6) [0.1264]
112. Florida Int'l (1-6) [0.1256]
113. Army (3-5) [0.1185]
114. Miami OH (0-8) [0.1078]
115. Akron (1-6) [0.1038]
116. Ball St (1-7) [0.0379]
117. Rice (0-8) [0.0368]
118. New Mexico (0-7) [0.0185]
119. Western Kentucky (0-7) [0.0139]
120. Eastern Michigan (0-7) [0.0083]
Conference Rankings (Average Per Team):
SEC 0.7010
Pac10 0.6296
Big10 0.5452
ACC 0.4894
BigEast 0.4877
Big12 0.4422
FBSInd 0.4353
MWC 0.3812
WAC 0.3519
CUSA 0.2690
SunBelt 0.2180
MAC 0.2169
Non-FBS -0.0867

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2 Comments:

At November 1, 2009 at 1:17 PM , Blogger Mason said...

There was also a certain nomenclature change once upon a time. :)

 
At November 1, 2009 at 7:20 PM , Blogger Peter J. Mucha said...

Yes, and we still keep the "monkeys" there in the picture!

 

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