March Madness: Analytical Models for NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Brackets

LIVE Presentation in Chicago
(Swag, Snacks, and More for Live Attendees)
IEEE Computer Society Chicago and IEEE Chicago are proud to co-host this ACM Distinguished Speaker Program hosted by ACM Chicago which will be held in-person and also online.
ACM Distinguished Speaker Program: "Analytical Models for Generating NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Bracket Pools: Injecting Computation into March Madness".
Each year, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament attracts popular attention, including bracket challenges where fans seek to pick the winners of the tournament’s games. However, the quantity and unpredictable nature of games suggest a single bracket will likely select some winning teams incorrectly even if created with insightful and sophisticated methods. Hence, a participant may wish to create a pool of brackets that likely contains at least one high-scoring bracket.
We propose several computational models to estimate the probability mass function of all possible tournament outcomes based on past tournament data. Bracket pools are then generated for recent tournaments using these models. The generated brackets are assessed by the ESPN scoring system and compared to those produced by a traditional pick favorite approach as well as the highest scoring brackets in the ESPN Tournament Challenge for various years.
The results suggest that given a sufficiently large pool of brackets, such models are effective in capturing high scoring brackets with high frequency. More information on this and related research can be found at http://bracketodds.cs.illinois.edu/
Location
Loyola University, Lake Shore Campus, is in the East Rogers Park area of Chicago. The talk will be held in Dumbach Hall, Room DU-117.
Dumbach Hall is labelled 16 on the Campus Map.
(https://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/pdfs-campusmaps/lsc.pdf)
(https://www.luc.edu/campustransportation/generalinformation/visitorsandguests/)
(http://tinyurl.com/tzadhu5z)
Register for the event at https://www.meetup.com/acm-chicago/events/299322518/ if you will be attending in person.
For those attending online, register at
https://acm-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FMBb9w3WSiKEJjIO27DPTA
Co-sponsored by: ACM Chicago
Speaker(s): Sheldon H. Jacobson,
Agenda:
Agenda:
(Times are Central Daylight Time)
5:30 pm – Networking/Social Hour
6:00pm – Brief intros
6:05pm – Talk by Sheldon Jacobson
7:45 pm – Q&A
7:00 pm – end
Room: Room DU-117, Bldg: Dumbach Hall, 1032 W Sheridan Rd, Chicago, Illinois, United States, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/408425