Cascadia R Conf 2021 Lightning Talks
Kevin Floyd
ICON Health and Fitness
Bear River Health Department
Logan, Utah
March Sadness: Building a Hands-on College Basketball Simulator in R
In March 2020, the sports world shut down at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the casualties was the 2020 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, canceled a week before it was scheduled to begin. In lieu of actual “March Madness”, I created a college basketball simulator in R based on player statistics, team trends, and, for added randomness, a single random seed. Repeating this pseudo-stochastic model of possessions in a basketball game, including some strategic decisions when necessary, I simulated the 2020 NCAA tournament that never was and the actual 2021 NCAA tournament. The inherent randomness in the simulations produced exciting results, some of which proved to be prescient, others wildly inaccurate. Reporting on the simulated games over social media as if they were real proved to be a fun diversion for myself and my inner circle during the uncertainty of the early pandemic. This simulator doesn’t solve the world’s problems, but it is an illustration of the versatility of the R language and the types of programs one can create with it.
Bio:
Kevin Floyd is a data analyst for ICON Health and Fitness and a COVID-19 data specialist for the Bear River Health Department, both in Logan, Utah. He got his MSc. in Statistics from Simon Fraser University in 2019, supervised by Dr. Tom Loughin, and his B.S. in statistics from Utah State University in 2016. Kevin’s academic and extracurricular statistical work focuses on applications in sports, particularly men’s and women’s college basketball.
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