Site icon R-bloggers

My Personal Intro to F1 Race Statistics

[This article was first published on OUseful.Info, the blog... » Rstats, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

One of the many things I keep avoiding is statistics. I’ve never really been convinced about the 5% significance level thing; as far as I can tell, hardly anything that’s interesting normally distributes; all the counting that’s involved just confuses me; and I never really got to grips with confidently combining probabilities. I find a lot of statistics related language impenetrable too, with an obscure vocabulary and some very peculiar usage. (Regular readers of this blog know that’s true here, as well 😉

So this year I’m going to try to do some stats, and use some stats, and see if I can find out from personal need and personal interest whether they lead me to any insights about, or stories hidden within, various data sets I keep playing with. So things like: looking for patterns or trends, looking for outliers, and comparing one thing with another. If I can find any statistics that appear to suggest particular betting odds look particularly favourable, that might be interesting too. (As Nate Silver suggests, betting, even fantasy betting, is a great way of keeping score…)

Note that what I hope will turn into a series of posts should not be viewed as tutorial notes – they’re far more likely to be akin to student notes on a problem set the student is trying to work through, without having attended any of the required courses, and without having taken the time to read through a proper tutorial on the subject. Nor do I intend to to set out with a view to learning particular statistical techniques. Instead, I’ll be dipping into the world of stats looking for useful tools to see if they help me explore particular questions that come to mind and then try to apply them cut-and-past fashion, which is how I approach most of my coding!

Bare naked learning, in other words.

So if you thought I had any great understanding about stats – in fact, any understanding at all – I’m afraid I’m going to disabuse you of that notion. As to my use of the R statistical programming language, that’s been pretty much focussed on using it for generating graphics in a hacky way. (I’ve also found it hard, in the past, plotting pixels on screen and page in a programmable way, but R graphics libraries such as ggplot2 make it really easy at a high level of abstraction…:-)

That’s the setting then… Now: #f1stats. What’s that all about?

Notwithstanding the above (that this isn’t about learning a particular set of stats methods defined in advance) I did do a quick trawl looking for “F1 stats tutorials” to see if there were any that I could crib from directly; but my search didn’t turn up much that was directly and immediately useful (if you know of anything that might be, please post a link in the comments). There were a few things that looked like they might be interesting, so here’s a quick dump of the relevant…

If you know of any other relevant looking papers or articles, please post a link in the comments.

I was hoping to finish this post with a couple of quick R hacks around some F1 datasets, but I’ve just noticed that today, as in yesterday, has become tomorrow, as in today, and this post is probably already long enough… So it’ll have to wait for another day…

PS FWIW, I also note the arrival of the Sports Analytics Innovation Summit in London in March… I doubt I have the impact required to make it as a media partner though… Although maybe OpenLearn does…?!


To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: OUseful.Info, the blog... » Rstats.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.