In p0bs/premPredictor: Calculations for a Football Prediction Competition

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
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  fig.path = "man/figures/",
  out.width = "100%"
)

premPredictor

premPredictor provides functions for running a football prediction competition for the Premier League.

In this particular competition, players need to predict the final table of a season before that season starts. Over the course of the season, the functions in this package show who has made the best prediction. In this case, 'best' is determined by the sum of squared differences between the actual standings of the teams and the player's predictions for those teams. The lower these differences, the better. A bonus (of -50 points) is also awarded for predicting the league winner.

Getting the predictions

To get the data from the players, I do the following:

Collate all predictions using this Google Form
Opt to get the results as a spreadsheet
Save the pertinent page of this spreadsheet as a csv file
Delete the email addresses from the csv file
Store this csv file in my public directory on Dropbox

Installation

You can install premPredictor from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("p0bs/premPredictor")

Example

I use the following code to track the standings in my competition:

library(premPredictor)

player_data <- get_player_data(
  'https://www.dropbox.com/s/rr0qdtrhn4n4h9i/PremPredict-19-20-blank-emails.csv'
  )

get_latest_standings(data_input = player_data)

... and this generates the following output:

> get_latest_standings(data_input = X)
             Names Scores Bonus       WorstClub WorstCost
1         Joe Wood    352     0       Sheff Utd       144
2     Peter Finnis    356   -50       Sheff Utd       169
3      Mike Finnis    406   -50       Sheff Utd       169
4   Andrea Laporta    414   -50       Sheff Utd       169
5    Robin Penfold    424     0       Sheff Utd       169
6    Imogen Finnis    434     0 AFC Bournemouth       100
7      Luke Finnis    434     0     Aston Villa        81
8  Mathew Saunders    438     0       Sheff Utd       144
9     John Penfold    498     0       Sheff Utd       169
10     Alan Finnis    514     0       Sheff Utd       121
11    Alan Butcher    516   -50       Sheff Utd       169
12   Marion Finnis    518     0       Sheff Utd       169
13   Hannah Harrop    526     0       Sheff Utd       169
14   Neil Waterman    526     0       Sheff Utd       169
15     Vera Finnis    544   -50       Leicester       196
16     Les Penfold    546     0       Sheff Utd       144
17    Beth Penfold    604     0       Leicester       196
18     Liz Penfold    668   -50          Wolves       144
19   Paula Penfold    684     0       Leicester       169
20    Scott Harrop    764     0       Sheff Utd       169
21    Laura Finnis    786   -50          Wolves       196