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Silver, Signals, & Noise

From Nate Silver

An excerpt from my forthcoming book, “The Signal and the Noise,” was published this week in The New York Times Magazine. You can find an online version of the excerpt here.

The book takes a comprehensive look at prediction across 13 fields, ranging from sports betting to earthquake forecasting. Since 2009, I have been traveling the country to meet with experts and practitioners in each of these fields in an effort to uncover common bonds. The book asks an ambitious question: What makes predictions succeed or fail?

Pre-ordering tonight. I had a thought about an interesting sports related challenge on the way home today. There’s enough historical play-by-play data for Major League Baseball, and possibly the National Football League, and straightforward enough grading, that you could build predictive models and test them real-time. Would be interesting to see how quickly and accurately a system could predict a game’s next pitch or play and outcome.

Might be some financial opportunities there as well.

Has it already been 4 years since 538 stormed the world? Time flies.

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