Bend it like Poisson
I don’t know why astro-ph thought this article on the statistics of football dynamics (Mendes, Malacarne, Anteneodo 2007; physics/0706.1758) was relevant to me and emailed the abstract, but I’m glad they did, because they deal with a question I have wrestled with for a long time: how to figure out the underlying distribution that controls a stochastic process. In 2002ApJ…580.1118K, we dealt with modeling the photon arrival time differences as due to flares occuring at random times but with a power-law intensity distribution with index alpha. physics/0706.1758 deals with time-between-touches and tries to characterize that distribution itself in terms of a number of “phases” beta. From a quick reading, it appears that their beta are our flares, and they restrict all flares to have the same intensity. Despite the restriction, this is interesting because it is an analytical estimation that points a way towards speeding up our flare distribution fitting process, which currently is based on a Monte-Carlo grid search method, not the fastest way to do things.
hlee:
This might be irrelevant but I’d like to mention this conference because it will be held at the same building where our group meeting happens.
2007 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sport to be held Sept. 29th, 2007 at Science Center.
One of the most frequently mentioned works of Prof. B. Efron is generalizing Stein’s estimator, where he used baseball batting records. Sportstatistics has been one of the important subfields in statistical science and as you pointed out lots of similarity of interests can be discovered due to the fact sports activity is full of motions (physics).
06-15-2007, 1:38 am