THE BOOK cover
The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more.
Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews

Buy The Book from Amazon


SABR101 required reading if you enter this site. Check out the Sabermetric Wiki. And interesting baseball books.
MOST RECENT ARTICLES
MAIL : You ask | We say

Advanced


THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Filter posts by...

 

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Giving the finger to correlation coefficient

By Tangotiger, 11:06 AM

I get mighty p.o.ed when talk comes to correlation coefficient (r), and how the r-squared “explains” something.  What it’s really saying is that, given that size of sample, the variance of the parameter you are studying explains a certain percentage of the total variance (including the variance from luck which is completely based on the size of the sample).  You can, in effect, control your r-squared to your liking.  Wanna prove clutch exists?  Use a sample size of 5000 PA.  Wanna prove clutch doesn’t exist?  Use a sample size of 50.

Anyway, while I get mighty p.o.ed, Phil takes it to another level.  Here are his archives on the matter.

If you see a researcher (baseball or otherwise) give a correlation coefficient, without giving you a regression equation (like Phil does), or a correlation coefficient equation (like r=PA/[PA+200]), give him the finger.

Page 1 of 1 pages

Latest...

COMMENTS

Feb 12 05:18
Reader Mail of the Day: Why do we need X years of fielding data?  And what about outliers?

Feb 12 04:55
Who is Jeremy Lin?

Feb 12 03:15
New PECOTA

Feb 12 02:42
Whitney Houston

Feb 12 02:23
Psst… wanna intern in Canada?

Feb 12 00:40
Clutch analogy

Feb 11 20:11
Fighting leads to goals?

Feb 11 19:55
Why do players get crappy caps?

Feb 11 19:12
Hero of the month: Brittney Baxter

Feb 11 17:59
MGL: Today on Clubhouse Confidential

THREADS

December 04, 2007
Giving the finger to correlation coefficient