2008/09 High Scorers Average - Men

Personal Bests Scores and Average Seasonal Scores do not predict winnings in a competition. They are a guide to the individual skater's progress.

Neither of these were meant to predict. The ASBs are not official and no one has to follow them next season.

Why take a negative issue with something unofficial and meaningless to oneself?

*Ahem*

There are two kinds of statistics, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. What Joe is talking about is descriptive statistics. A statistic is a number that summarizes some interesting property of a collection of numbers. Joe’s average (aka arithmetic mean) describes what happened. These averages can be used to compare one skater to another, to set a bench mark for next year, etc. – or just to provide some interesting data to think about.

There are some other statistics that might also be interesting, such as standard deviation (which skaters are more consistent than others?) or progression of scores from the beginning to the end of the season (who had momentum, who peaked at the right time?)

The main use of “season’s best” is, in my opinion, to give individual skaters, especially at the lower levels, a mark to measure their individual progress by.

The other kind of statistics is inferential statistics. This is what Buttercup is talking about. In this topic we take the numbers before us as a sample of data from which we wish to infer properties of the population of data from which the sample was drawn. If we try to use these average scores to predict the results of future competitions, for instance, this is inferential statistics. The reliability of such predictions depends on many factors. Some of them have been mentioned on this thread: the sample size is too small, the variance is too big, judging may not be consistent, a skater had one bad competition that threw the average off – all of these things cause both random and systematic errors that cast doubt on the validity of our conclusions.

So IMHO there is nothing really to argue about. The average season scores have interest in their own right, but no claim is made about making predictions based on these numbers.

Thanks, Ant and Mathman. Trust me, I'm the last person who should be trying to explain math and statistics!

I'm with Buttercup on this. Just can't do Stats beyond the Bell Curve and even that is weak. Thanks much, MM, for the explanations. I will stick with my arithmetic device and hopefully someone picks up the deviations.

Hopefully, I will get around to do more skaters particularly all those who were in the GPs. As long as fans don't believe it is a prediction device, I am happy.

I think the ASB's set up good bench marks and guidlines. One could determine who the top teir skaters are. The fact that anything above 220 was a solid score for the 08-09 season and anything above 200 was pretty good. I would like to see other averages like what was the average winning scores or the average score for the medalist or the average difference between scores of the medalist. I know all the major events such and GPF, Euro,4CC, Worlds all the winners scored over 230 and two of them surpass 240. Over the past two seasons I would say 240 is that magic winning number.

enlight78 said:

Over the past two seasons I would say 240 is that magic winning number.

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I think so, too. I always figured that the goal to shoot for (men) is 80-80-80. 80 for the short program, 80 for TES in the LP, 80 for PCSs in the LP.

For a lady, 65+65+65 = 195.

I haven't done any Ladies seasonal average scores but if time permits I will. Just thinking of YuNa's Worlds score to ponder.

Doctoral Dissertation

Joesitz said:

On the other hand, you can stick with the Personal Best score with certain judges at a certain venue for a one-time score to explain the possible future of the skater. You do not have to use the Average Seasonal Best. You are entitled to watch skating as you prefer. No problem.

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I think it would be interesting as the topic for a doctoral dissertation in statistics. I then think it would be interesting to send it to Cinquanta and the ISU to point out the faults of the judging system.

That being said, at the end of the day, there is probably some reliability with respect to intrajudge meaasurement. However, with secret judging, how would we ever know?:

There was some positive and negative discussions on YuNa's red dress. Did it affect the outcome of the Ladies results? I ignored it, and I think those who would use ASBs for prediction purposes should be very careful. That's not the intention. The Stats for RBIs in baseball shows something special about a batter but it does not predict a winning score.

The ASBs are just to show individual progress of the skater - Up or Down or Steady.