The Science of Medal Predictions (2016 Rio Olympics Edition) | Two Minute Papers #85

dear fellow Scholars this is 2minute papers with Caro the 2016 Rio Olympic Games is right around the corner so it is the perfect time to talk a bit about how we can use science to predict the results before we start I'd like to mention that we won't be showcasing any predictions for this year's Olympics instead we are going to talk about a model that was used to predict the results of previous Olympic Games events so the following very simple question arises can we predict the future and the answer is very simple no we can't end of video thanks for watching well Jokes Aside we cannot predict the future itself but we can predict what is likely to happen based on our experience of what happened so far in mathematics this is what we call extrapolation there is also a big difference between trying to extrapolate the results of one athlete or the aggregated number of medals for many athletes usually an entire nation to bring up an example about traffic if we were to predict where one individual car is heading we would obviously fail most of the time however whichever City we live in we know exactly the hotpots where there are traffic jams every single morning of the year we cannot accurately predict the behavior of one individual but if we increase the size of the problem and predict for a group of people it suddenly gets easier going back to the Olympics will Usain Bolt win the gold on the 100 met Sprint this year predicting the results of one athlete is usually hopeless and we bravely call such Endeavors to be mere speculation the guy whose results we are trying to predict may not even show up this year as many of you have heard many of the Russian athletes have been banned from the Olympic Games our model would sure as hell not be able to predict this or would it we'll see in a second but hopefully it is easy to see that macro level predictions are much more feasible than predicting on an individual level in fact to demonstrate how much of an understatement it is to say feasible hold on to your seat belts because Daniel Johnson a professor of microeconomics at the Colorado College created a simple prediction model that over the past five Olympic Games was able to achieve 94% agreement between the predicted and the actual medal counts per Nation what is even more amazing is that the model doesn't even take into consideration the athletic abilities of any of these contenders wow media articles report that his model uses only five simple variables a country's per capita income population political structure climate and host nation Advantage now I'd first like to mention that GDP PP per capita means the gross domestic product of one person in a given country therefore it is independent of the population of the country if we sit down and read the paper which is a great and very easy read and you should definitely have a look it's in the video description box so upon reading the paper we realize there are more variables that are subject to scrutiny for instance a proximity factor which encodes the distance from the hosting Nation not only the hosting Nation itself but its neighbors are also enjoying significant advantages in the form of lower Transportation costs and being used to the climate of the venue unfortunately I haven't found his predictions for this year's Olympics but based on the Simplicity of the model it should be quite easy to run the predictions provided that the sufficient data is available the take-home message is that usually the bigger the group we are trying to predict results for the lesser the number of variables that are enough to explain their behavior if we are talking about the Olympics five or six variables are enough to Faithfully predict Nationwide metal counts these are amazing results that are also a nice Testament to the power of mathematics I also really like how the citation count of the paper gets a big bump every four years I wonder why if you are interested in how the Olympic Games unfold make sure to have a look at the Olympics Reddit I found it to be second to none as always the link is available in the description box thanks for watching and for your generous support and I'll see you next time