Publications by rstats on Robert Hickman
Could an Independent Yorkshire Win the World Cup – Data & Scraping
Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short article I wrote for CityMetric on the topic. It’s split o...
2280 sym R (3706 sym/3 pcs) 2 img
Could an Independent Yorkshire Win the World Cup – LASSOs and Player Positions
Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short article I wrote for CityMetric on the topic. It’s split o...
3808 sym R (7143 sym/7 pcs) 2 img
Could an Independent Yorkshire Win the World Cup – Finding British Player’s Birthplaces
Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short article I wrote for CityMetric on the topic. It’s split o...
4295 sym R (9552 sym/7 pcs) 2 img
Could an Independent Yorkshire Win the World Cup – Picking Teams
Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short article I wrote for CityMetric on the topic. It’s split o...
3948 sym R (6937 sym/10 pcs) 8 img
Could an Independent Yorkshire Win the World Cup – Simulate World Cups
Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short article I wrote for CityMetric on the topic. It’s split o...
6762 sym R (13830 sym/14 pcs) 12 img
Could an Independent Yorkshire Win the World Cup – Rest of the World/UK
Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? I published the complete code for that article on this blog this week. However, one question which I...
3102 sym R (6767 sym/8 pcs) 6 img
The Knowledge 4th August 2018
The Guardian publish a weekly set of questions and answers on a variety of football minutiae at The Knowledge. Forutnately, some of these are extremely tractable using R, so I thought I’d have a go at working through the archives to see if I can shed light on any of the questions. library(rvest) library(dplyr) library(magrittr) library(data.tab...
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Which English County Has Won the Most Points
Every so often a question on The Guardian’s The Knowledge football trivia section piques my interest and is amenable to analysis using R. Previously, I looked at club name suffixes and young World Cup winners last August. This week (give or take), a question posed on twitter caught my attention: @TheKnowledge_GU was just chatting to some colle...
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Riddler 1st February 2019
Riddler Classic In my spare time I enjoy solving 538’s The Riddler column. This week I had a spare few hours waiting for the Superbowl to start and decided to code up a solution to the latest problem to keep me busy. The question revolves around a card game in which whatever choice a player makes, they are likely to lose to a con artist. Formal...
3696 sym R (3556 sym/5 pcs) 2 img
An Introduction to Modelling Soccer Matches in R (part 1)
For anyone watching football, being able to predict matches is a key aspect of the hobby. Whether explicitly (e.g. when betting on matches, or deciding on recruitment for an upcoming season), or more implicitly when discussing favourites to win the league in the pub, almost all discussion of the sport on some level require predictions about some...
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