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Abstract Details

Activity Number: 438
Type: Invited
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Sports
Abstract - #303492
Title: Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of Hitting Performance in Baseball
Author(s): Blakeley B. McShane*+ and Shane T Jensen and Abraham J Wyner
Companies: Northwestern University and The Wharton School and The Wharton School
Address: 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL, 60208,
Keywords: baseball ; hidden markov model ; hierarchical bayes
Abstract:

We have developed a sophisticated statistical model for predicting the hitting performance of Major League baseball players. The Bayesian paradigm provides a principled method for balancing past performance with crucial covariates, such as player age and position. We share information across time and across players by using mixture distributions to control shrinkage for improved accuracy. We compare the performance of our model to current sabermetric methods on a held-out season (2006), and discuss both successes and limitations.


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