Round of 16: What's Sweet about It?

The Statistics Department is running a March Madness contest, and I couldn't resist entering.
It is organized a little differently than the usual bracket picking, which made it more fun to
prepare an entry.  You are given a budget of 100 units,  and you must pick a subset of teams
as many as you want subject to the budget constraint:  Teams seeded 1 cost 25, 2 cost 19, ...
16 seeds cost 1.  I simulated 10,000 brackets, and recorded the survival probabilities as in
the earlier survival plot on this blog, and then computed the expected number of wins for
each team, normalized by their cost, ordered the teams and produced the following list of
teams.  The winner is the entry whose teams accumulate the largest number of wins.

                 EWins Seeds Cost      Bang CumCost CumEWins

Gonzaga         1.1619    11    4 0.2904750       4   1.1619

Pittsburgh      0.9041    10    4 0.2260250       8   2.0660

Cincinnati      1.0757     9    5 0.2151400      13   3.1417

Iowa            1.6385     7    8 0.2048125      21   4.7802

Syracuse        0.8112    10    4 0.2028000      25   5.5914

VA Commonwealth 0.7855    10    4 0.1963750      29   6.3769

West Virginia   2.4625     3   13 0.1894231      42   8.8394

Duke            2.2013     4   12 0.1834417      54  11.0407

Purdue          1.9888     5   11 0.1808000      65  13.0295

Connecticut     0.9040     9    5 0.1808000      70  13.9335

Butler          0.8602     9    5 0.1720400      75  14.7937

Indiana         1.8908     5   11 0.1718909      86  16.6845

Texas A&M       1.8507     3   13 0.1423615      99  18.5352

Sign of the Times

Bracketology 2016

Again, it is time to fill the brackets.  This year, again, I'm planning to join the Kaggle gaggle, but
I thought I would report here what this years survival probabilities look like.  The situation is quite
different than last year, when Kentucky was the overwhelming favorite.  This year there is a quite
close race with three teams:  Kansas, MSU, and UNC all above 0.10 probability of winning it all,
with 0.16, 0.12, 0.11 respectively.  This is based on my 1000 simulations of the tournament with
my standard QR model, just like last year when Kentucky was at 0.40.  Here is a Tufte type
spark lines graphic with this years survival functions.

This year we have also posted a new bracket generator at

http://www.econ.uiuc.edu:8080/QBracketology/

that can be used to generate a random bracket according to this year's fitted model.  Thanks to
Ignacio Sarmiento Barbieri for help with the R shiny implementation of this.  Further details
about the methods underlying all of this are available here:

http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger/research/bracketology/MM.html