Tuesday, 6 March 2007

Scoring systems

If country rankings were based on the average score of all the team members then New Zealand would be coming second!

#
Country Total Pilots Ave
1 CZE 15890 7 2270
2 NZL 6409 3 2136
3 CHE 13011 7 1859
4 GBR 12863 7 1838
5 FRA 12310 7 1759
6 DEU 11339 7 1620
7 ESP 7925 5 1585
8 SVN 9983 7 1426

If you wanted to be really perverse about scoring systems (almost as unfair as the current system) then if you took each country's lowest three scoring pilots then NZ would be coming first!

Country lowest 3
1 NZL 6409
2 CZE 5723
3 JPN 4618
4 CHE 4610
5 ITA 4600
6 AUS 4441
7 BEL 4289
8 BRA 4239
9 CAN 4226
10 AUT 4148
11 NOR 4016
12 DNK 3979
13 DEU 3931
14 RUS 3809
15 USA 3799
16 ESP 3718
17 IND 3666
18 VEN 3661
19 NLD 3634
20 SWE 3625
21 GBR 3483
22 FRA 3337
23 POL 3271
24 KOR 3130
25 ZAF 3099
26 HRV 2998
27 SVN 2351

Kris

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well done team NZL, but bear in mind that the calculations you've done do not give a fair result to larger teams.

Larger teams have more pilots so averaging the scores simply dilutes the scores of the best pilots with those of the worse. So, larger teams will be penalised relative to small teams with your averaging system.

Picking the worst three pilots from each time obviously is unfair on the larger teams since by sheer force of numbers they will have more lower-scoring pilots than smaller teams.

A more sensible comparison would be to look at the top 3 pilots in each team. This gives the table:
1 CZE 7762 Slivova, Brauner, Vrbensky
2 GBR 7503 Goldsmith, Thomas, Ham
3 FRA 7230 Caron, Cortella, Cazaux
4 CHE 6549 Maurer, Wyss, Cox
5 NZL 6409 Middendorf, Rold, Gaw
6 SVN 5934 Valic, Kranjc, Podobnik
7 DEU 5896 Siegel, Malecki, RÃssel
8 ESP 5838 Martinez, Bonet, Rodriguez
9 POL 5718 Ziolkowski, Bulgakow, Faron

However, this still penalises smaller teams since the larger teams have have someone who wouldn't have been selected if they could only send three pilots. So, using FAI ranking as a proxy for what the team would have been if each nation could only send three pilots you end up with the fair table:
1 GBR 7503 Goldsmith, Thomas, Ham
2 CZE 7347 Brauner, Ohlidal, Vrbensky
3 CHE 6418 Maurer, Wyss, Aebi
4 NZL 6409 Middendorf, Gaw, Rold
5 FRA 6025 Cazaux, Blondeau, Caron
6 SVN 5717 Valic, Podobnik, Valic
7 NOR 5629 Dale, Saebu, Helgesen
8 ESP 5607 Martinez, Bonet, Morillas
9 USA 5388 Belcourt, Cohn, Mccune

The CZE lose Petra since she's ranked below Vrbensky which drops their score. It's impressive that even without her they'd still be 2nd overall.

So, NZL might be 4th, but you're not 1st :-)

Best regards,
Tom

Anonymous said...

and what happens if you choose the team for each country based on FAI ranking, but with 2 men & 1 woman?... that puts Petra back in, but what does it do to the others?

Anonymous said...

Hi Tom
Thanks for your analysis. An earlier post noted that NZL would be coming fifth if the best three pilots were used to determine the rankings. The "worst three pilots" comparison was done very much tongue in cheek! : )

However you analyse it we all can agree that the Kiwi team is doing really well.
Cheers
Kris