Statistics student competes at Mathsport
The School of Mathematics and Statistics continues its successful collaboration with Wellington’s data consultancy, DOT Loves Data and its lead partner and School adjunct, Dr Paul Bracewell.
DOT Loves Data doctoral scholarship recipient, Ankit Patel, has made excellent progress with his research on sports statistics under Dr Bracewell’s supervision.
In July, Ankit travelled to the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland for the 14th Australasian Conference on Mathematics and Computers in Sport (Mathsport) Conference. Mathsport is a special interest group of ANZIAM, the Australia-New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics organisation.
Ankit presented his work exploring statistically-based rating systems and their effectiveness in a range of real-world contexts. The quality of his work was recognised with the Neville de Mestre Best Student Paper and Presentation Award.
Two distinct components of his research were presented in separate papers. The first paper outlined the development of a framework to quantify the impact of social engagement on data-driven digital marketing material. This work bridged the definitional gap between academia and industry regarding digital marketing engagement. It developed a methodology to quantify that digital engagement and constructed a robust and meaningful metric to measure digital marketing success.
The second paper constructed a method for improving estimates of the expected total in the first innings of a T20 game of cricket. Run prediction systems currently utilised within limited overs cricket suffer from two model issues: overly broad match representation metrics and inability to account for contextual match factors. Ankit implemented a gradient boosted model (GBM) to account for these two issues delivering a model with greater accuracy in the early stages of this game.
Ankit completed a conjoint BCom/BSc majoring in Finance, Marketing and Statistics before being awarded a Master of Applied Statistics and a Master of Science in Statistics. He is in the final year of his PhD studies.