Math With Jerome

Lotteries are typically really tough to win. Powerball, Mega Millions, and even state lotteries are all damn near impossible claim the jackpot. Even winning anything is pretty unlikely. Getting a Pick 5 (numbers 0-9) exactly right is 1 in 100,000. Getting luck enough to draft the next phenom like LeBron, Anthony Davis, or perhaps Zion Williamson? That's much, much easier than getting a few digits in the right order. NBA Draft System and Protected Picks A quick refresher: The NBA determines the selection order of the first 14 (of 30) teams for an upcoming draft of new players by a lottery system. These are teams that didn't make the playoffs. The rest of the draft order is determined by inverse order of regular season record. The NHL also has a lottery system for non-playoff teams but differs for teams in the post season where order is determined partially by playoff performance and regular season point total. In the NFL, non-playoff teams are ordered purely by regular sea...

Last call for brackets! It's the last few hours and I am here to help. Even if the deadline passes use this to try and find any potential upsets. I used three classification models to predict each the winner of any match-up for the 2019 Men's basketball tournament. You can pick whichever model seems the best to you, or use the three in a voting scheme where majority picks the winner! To learn more about the model types (if you're interested) I used:  logistic regression  -  neural network  -  random forest Use the search bar to and type in both school names you are looking for, and the probabilities next to each model are the likelihood that predictor gives to School X winning the match-up. If you're having trouble with the table on this site, click here to open the table in a new window. As always, feel free to reach out with any feedback via email ( math.w.jerome@gmail.com ) or through twitter! Tweet to @MathWithJerome Follow @MathWit...