DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - ESPN finds top 2 seeds have had easy draws at USO

**Angeheade** · 08-16-2011, 05:38 AM

I don't get the numbers they present about halfway down the page. They're showing the percentage of their simulations that were "at least as easy" as the average of the real draws. So the ideal number should be 50%. Half the simulations are easier, half are harder. Instead the AO and FO women's draws are almost 100%. That means nearly every one of the thousand simulations gave harder draws than the real ones. This is just as unlikely as the 0% USO draws. I think they're done something really wrong in their analysis.

As I see it, these are basically what are called p-values: probabilities that the result could be achieved in true randomness. With a 100% p-value, there is a 100% chance that the draw would be perfectly random. Usually in statistics, a p-value of something less than 5% is needed for the result to be significant. Since this study had one of .3% for the men and 0% for the women, it'd be significant. Hope that makes sense.

By the way, just because there were only 10 US Opens in the study doesn't really make a difference because the goal was to find how likely it would be for those 10 US Opens to have the kind of draws they did, not for any one of the tournaments to have an easy draw. If it was just one year, it would be much easier for the tournament directors to cast it off as an anomaly, but 10 years is more difficult.

08-16-2011, 05:38 AM	#11
Angeheade Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 679 Senior Member	I don't get the numbers they present about halfway down the page. They're showing the percentage of their simulations that were "at least as easy" as the average of the real draws. So the ideal number should be 50%. Half the simulations are easier, half are harder. Instead the AO and FO women's draws are almost 100%. That means nearly every one of the thousand simulations gave harder draws than the real ones. This is just as unlikely as the 0% USO draws. I think they're done something really wrong in their analysis. As I see it, these are basically what are called p-values: probabilities that the result could be achieved in true randomness. With a 100% p-value, there is a 100% chance that the draw would be perfectly random. Usually in statistics, a p-value of something less than 5% is needed for the result to be significant. Since this study had one of .3% for the men and 0% for the women, it'd be significant. Hope that makes sense. By the way, just because there were only 10 US Opens in the study doesn't really make a difference because the goal was to find how likely it would be for those 10 US Opens to have the kind of draws they did, not for any one of the tournaments to have an easy draw. If it was just one year, it would be much easier for the tournament directors to cast it off as an anomaly, but 10 years is more difficult.
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