About our experts
Ray
Stefani is
a professor at the University of California, Long
Beach. He provides the analysis for the Tri nation
Super 12 and Guiness Cup Rugby Union competitions,
as well as providing NFL American Football analysis
for OZmium.
Ray's
interest in sport comes from first hand involvement.
In his college days he competed in swimming at Notre
Dame as an undergraduate, making eligibility for the
1960 Olympic Swimming Trials at the 1500m distance,
and in bowling at the University of Arizona as a graduate
student. For a year he trained for the modern pentathlon,
choosing to return to a Ph.D program rather than the
Olympic Trials in 1968.
Ray
became interested in sports predictions as a result
of a Ph.D topic in statistical estimation.
From 1971 until 1980 he provided weekly predictions
for American Football to a number of newspapers.
During
1981-82 he spent a sabbatical in Switzerland where,
in addition to technical work in his field, he studied
European betting systems.
From 1980 to 1994 he created predictions for Australian
Rules Football.
Since
1994 he has been creating soccer predictions and has
now turned his attention to Rugby Union.
Other interests include rating systems for the major
international sports, comparing and explaining the
rate of improvement in Olympic winning performances
and proposing an explanation for the performance differential
of male and female Olympic champions based on physics
and physiology.
Ray
Stefani Rugby Union Analysis
Stefan
Yelas is a former student of prominent
sports statistician Professor Stephen Clarke and has
a Master of Science degree in Applied Statistics from
Swinburne University.
Stefan
developed an interest in sports predictions and profitable
gambling through his studies of probability, gaming
and sports modeling.
In
2003, Stefan completed a master thesis, which showed
the Swinburne Computer was able to identify inefficiencies
in the AFL (Australian football) betting market.
Whilst
completing this thesis Stefan undertook the subject
'Sports Performance Modeling', taught by Professor
Clarke. Part of the assessment involved producing
a sport prediction model. Stefan chose to predict
the 2003 Rugby World Cup. The aim was to produce individual
match predictions and also, via a simulation, predictions
for the tournament as a whole.
The
forecasting model attempted to predict not only the
winner of each game of the 2003 Rugby World Cup, but
also each team's chance of a place finish (first to
eighth) at any given time in the tournament. The
model's forecasts were published on the Swinburne
Sports Statistics website to build awareness of the
department's sports predictions and courses.
The
model was extremely succesful and achieved considerable
publicity. Exposure included a Campus review article
(will be published below shortly), predictions on
the front page of The Age newspaper sports section,
mentions in The Herald Sun newspaper, The Sydney Morning
Herald newspaper, The Wellington Times newspaper,
the website www.rugbyheaven.com.au and interviews
on Bathurst and Melbourne radio.
Stefan, being an expatriate New Zealander, has a great
interest in the game; however, he does not involve
his heart in the prediction model!
Some
publications by Professor Ray Stefani
1.
"Football and Basketball Predictions Using Least
Squares." IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and
Cybernetics. February 1977. pp. 117-121
2.
"Improved Least Squares Football, Basketball,
and Soccer Predictions." IEEE Transactions on
Systems, Man and Cybernetics. February 1980. pp. 116-123.
3.
"Applications of Statistical Methods to American
Football," Journal of Applied Statistics, Vol.
14, No. 1, March 1987, pp. 61-73.
4.
"Australian Rules Football During the 1980's,"
with Stephen Clarke, (Swinburne Inst. of Tech., Hawthorn,
Australia), Proceedings of the Australian Society
for Operations Research 11th National Conference,
Brisbane, Australia, July 7-10 1991.
5.
"Applying Least Squares to Team Sports and Olympic
Winning Performances", Proceedings of the First
Annual
Mathematics and Computers in Sports Conference, sponsored
by the Australian Mathematics Society and the Australian
Sports Commission, July 13-15 1992, Bond University,
Queensland, Australia, pp 43-59
6.
"Predicting the Outcome of Soccer Matches",
presented at 1997 Joint Statistical Meeting, American
Statistical Association, Statistics in Sport Program,
Anaheim, California, August 10-14, 1997
7.
"A Systems Overview of Sports Ratings and Rankings",
Proceedings of the Section on Statistics in Sport
Program, 2000 Joint Statistical Meeting, American
Statistical Association, Indianapolis, Indiana, August
13-17, 2000.
8.
"The Fundamental Nature of Differential Male/Female
World and Olympic Winning Performances, Sports and
Rating Systems", Invited Presentation and Paper,
Proceedings of the Sixth Australian Conference on
Mathematics and Computers in Sport, July 1-3, 2002,
pp 32-46
9.
"Power Output of Olympic Rowing Champions",
Olympic Review, no. XXVI-30, pp.59-63, Dec 1999-Jan
2000.
10.
"Olympic Winning Performances: No Longer Citius,
Altius, Fortius", Chance, Spring 2000,vol. 13,
no. 2, pp 15-19.
Some
publications by Stefan Yelas
1.
"Analysis of the Swinburne Computer performance
in identifying inefficiencies in the AFL betting market",
Unpublished MSc Thesis, School of Mathematical Sciences.
2003, Swinburne University of Technology: Hawthorn.
2.
(Clark,S. and Yelas,S.), "Forecasting the 2003
Rugby World Cup". Unpublished Paper, School of
Mathematical Sciences. 2004, Swinburne University
of Technology: Hawthorn.
Rugby
Union index page
The
system
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