Predictors of Success
I recently ran an idea by a professional sports mathematician, and ended up with some interesting ideas. Here is the email chain slightly edited. Its not a doctoral thesis, just a ‘back-of-a-napkin discussion on stats. AL At Home on the Court mentioned in a recent post about the statistical significance of the sample size in volleyball stats - and made the point that the sample sizes are not big enough in a match to really mean anything from a predictive point of view. I suspect there are both simple and complicated ways to determine if the sample size is appropriate to be predictive or not (as opposed to simply a mathematical representation of what happened). So - what's the quick answer to this? KJ The short version is “it depends”. There’s not really any such things as a “big enough” sample size, only sample sizes that give enough “power”. The more accurate you want to be, the more samples you need. I would say that 20-30 games is about what you’d need in most