There are certainly many models, which try to “calculate” which team will win the 2010 soccer world cup. Looking at the teams that already dropped out, the range of models which were obviously not predicting correctly gets quite big. Here is a visualization of my favorite:
For those of you, who more believe in numbers and don’t want to be fooled by visual explanations, the years in which the (multiple) cup winners succeeded all add up to 3,964. Like for all good models, we have outliers, i.e., two of the outcomes do not fit the model, which – hey- is 2 out of 15 = 13% error.
Most importantly though, a good model predicts the things we believe in. All over all, I think the model fulfills all good practices of classical statistics. The only thing that makes me think a bit are the team to beat to get to the prediction: Argentina, Spain, Brazil.
Anyway, good to have a second “evidence” apart from the octopus.
Update: I did this in Apple’s Keynote, as I was to lazy to give protovis a try – anyone more ambitious?
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