The Colley Rankings

I ran across this in a recent SciAm podcast. Thought it would be of interest to you all.

Wes Colley was a grad student at Princeton in Astrophysics. He came up with something called The Colley Matrix Method to analyze imprecise data by taking the median of a bunch of measurements (explained here). It seems to be like a wisdom of crowds thing, using median statistics to squeeze the noise out of noisy data. According to what his advisor said on the podcast, it appears to be pretty reliable. It accurately, retroactively predicted a number of actual results.

In any case, he applies this to college sports  as well as to politics.

According to the latest results, as of 7/2, Obama holds a 317 to 221 lead over McCain in the electoral college.

Yes, we can. :-)