The 100m mean's sprint finals of the 2012 London Olympics are over and Usain Bolt won the gold medal again with a winning time of 9.63s. Time to compare the result with my forecast of 9.68s, posted on 22 July.
My simple log-linear model predicted a winning time of 9.68s with a prediction interval from 9.39s to 9.97s. Well, that is of course a big interval of more than half a second, or ±3%. Yet, the winning time was only 0.05s away from my prediction. That is less than 1% difference. Not bad for such a simple model. Read more »
It is less than a week before the 2012 Olympic games will start in London. No surprise therefore that the papers are all over it, including a lot of data and statistis around the games.
The Economist investigated the potential financial impact on sponsors (some benefits), tax payers (no benefits) and the athletes (if they are lucky) in its recent issue and video.
The biggest event of the Olympics will be one of the shortest: the 100 metres men final. It will be all over in less than 10 seconds. In 1968 Jim Hines was the first gold medal winner, who achieved a sub-ten-seconds time and since 1984 all gold medal winners have run faster than 10 seconds. The historical run times of the past Olympics going back to 1896 are available from databasesport.com.
Looking at the data it appears that a simple log-linear model will give a reasonable forecast for the 2012 Olympic's result (ignoring the 1896 time). Of course such a model doesn't make sense forever, as it would suggest that future run-times will continue to shrink. Hence, some kind of logistics model might be a better approach, but I have no idea what would be a sensible floor for it. Others have used ideas from extreme value theory to investigate the 100m sprint, see the paper by Einmahl and Smeets, which would suggest a floor greater than 9 seconds.
Historical winning times for the 100m mean final. Red line: log-linear regression, black line: logistic regression.
My simple log-linear model forecasts a winning time of 9.68 seconds, which is 1/100 of a second faster than Usain Bolt's winning time in Beijing in 2008, but still 1/10 of a second slower than his 2009 World Record (9.58s) in Berlin.
Never-mind, I shall stick to my forecast. The 100m final will be held on 5 August 2012. Now even I get excited about the Olympics, and be it for less than 10 seconds.
R code
Here is the R code used in this the post:
library(XML) library(drc) url <- "http://www.databaseolympics.com/sport/sportevent.htm?enum=110&sp=ATH" data <- readHTMLTable(readLines(url), which=2, header=TRUE) golddata <- subset(data, Medal %in% "GOLD") golddata$Year <- as.numeric(as.character(golddata$Year)) golddata$Result <- as.numeric(as.character(golddata$Result)) tail(golddata,10) logistic <- drm(Result~Year, data=subset(golddata, Year>=1900), fct = L.4()) log.linear <- lm(log(Result)~Year, data=subset(golddata, Year>=1900)) years <- seq(1896,2012, 4) predictions <- exp(predict(log.linear, newdata=data.frame(Year=years))) plot(logistic, xlim=c(1896,2012), ylim=c(9.5,12), xlab="Year", main="Olympic 100 metre", ylab="Winning time for the 100m men's final (s)") points(golddata$Year, golddata$Result) lines(years, predictions, col="red") points(2012, predictions[length(years)], pch=19, col="red") text(2012, 9.55, round(predictions[length(years)],2))
Update 5 August 2012
You find a comparison of my forecast to the final outcome of Usain Bolt's winning time of 9.63s on my follow-up post.
The Guardian published a nice summary and link collection of an interdisciplinary visualisation workshop hosted by Microsoft dedicated to visualising probability and risk. Check it out here.
I had mentioned the Guardian's data blog and the need for more data journalism earlier here. What I really like about the Guardian's approach in particular is that they share the data of their articles and encourage readers to use it.
Of course there are perfectly valuable reasons for only displaying a chart and not making the underlying data available, e.g. to generate leads, as potential customers may get in touch with you asking for the underlying data, or technology issues that don't allow you to upload data, etc.
I personally believe that when I show a chart I should also make the underlying data available. Pretty pictures give you the attention, but the underlying data will offer you an opportunity to engage with your reader on a different level. This might be similar to open source software. In most cases users don't want to see and read the code, but having the knowledge that they could provides more credibility.
Here is another reason why I should make the data available: Because it is easy to extract the data from a chart anyhow, thanks to digitizing software like the Java application plot digitizer. While in the past I may have used graph paper and a ruler, nowadays it only takes a few minutes to extract the information.
We need more data journalism. How else will we find the nuggets of data and information worth reading?
Life should become easier for data journalists, as the Guardian, one of the data journalism pioneers, points out in this article about the new open data initiative of the European Union (EU). The aims of the EU's open data strategy are bold. Data is seen as the new gold of the digital age. The EU is estimating that public data is already generating economic value of €32bn each year, with growth potential to €70bn, if more data will be made available. Here is the link to the press statement, which I highly recommend reading:
I am particularly impressed that the EU even aims to harmonise the way data will be published by the various bodies. We know that working with data, open or proprietary, often means spending a lot of time on cleaning, reshaping and transforming it, in order to join it with other sources and to make sense out of it.
Data standards would really help in this respect. And the EU is pushing this as well. I can observe this in the insurance industry already, where new European regulatory requirements (Solvency II) force companies to increase their data management capabilities. This is often a huge investment and has to be seen as a long term project.
Although the press statement doesn't mention anything about open source software projects, I think that they are essential for unfolding the full potential of open data.
Open source projects like R provide a platform to share new ideas. I'd say that R, but equally other languages as well, provide interfaces between minds and hands. Packages, libraries, etc. make it possible to spread ideas and knowledge. Having access to scientific papers is great but being able to test the ideas in practice accelerates the time it takes to embed new developments from academia into the business world.
