The Key to the Perfect March Madness Bracket: Evolution
To generate entire brackets is to tangle not just with the randomness of the game itself, but with the randomness of your betting pool.
WIRED / MARCH 2018
Predicting the Winners and losers of March Madness is such a daunting challenge that it attracts math nerds like Starfleet voyagers lining up at Comic-Con. Statisticians, economists, Silicon Valley coders, the PhD quants at hedge funds and gambling syndicates: They’ve all tried to “solve” the outcome of the annual college basketball tournament’s 63 matchups.
“Every kid who takes a mathematical modeling class and who’s a college basketball fan, the first thing they want to do is predict the NCAA tournament,” says Ken Pomeroy, a former meteorologist who has become arguably the foremost college basketball numbers guru. His famous KenPom ratings measure the strength of all 351 NCAA Division 1 basketball teams using an old-school regression technique known as “least squares,” which analyzes statistical variances in teams’ past performances and helps predict the winners in two-team matchups.
But to generate entire brackets is to tangle not just with the randomness of the game itself, but with the randomness of your betting pool—the lucky guesses made by all the people you’re competing against to predict the greatest number of winners. Microsoft researchers have unleashed their machine-learning engine Bing Predicts on March Madness forecasts, and several independent researchers, such as the chief data scientist of a big defense consultant, have used neural networks to entwine discrete predictive models into “ensembles” that spit out probabilities. But some of the most intense March Madness research is being done by David Hess. He’s a 36-year-old with degrees in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins and NYU who’s also from Kansas, and is thus “a huge college basketball fan.” In 2011 he went to work at a sports prediction site called Team Rankings, where he set out to build a tool to produce optimized NCAA tournament brackets for paying customers.…