March Madness and Advanced Analytics: Improving Your Bracket Odds

Presented by Sheldon H. Jacobson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) men’s Division I college basketball tournament (more commonly known as March
Madness) is an annual competition which draws widespread attention in the United States. The presentation will cover the following items:

Background on March Madness and Bracketology,
Advanced analytical methods that can be used to assess the odds of different seed combinations in different rounds of the tournament,
Showcase the web site, bracketodds.cs.illinois.edu, which allows fans to assess their own brackets,
A real-time assessment of the 2014 tournament (which will be occurring during the conference) up until the time of the presentation