Welcome to the New Horizons series!  Now, statistics is littered with obscure concepts that make it difficult to understand - remember those A-Level Maths lessons?  I certainly do!  That's why we can't just 'jump into' predictive modelling techniques.  Very quickly we'd get lost - and demoralised.  Rather, we have to build from the ground up with the basic ideas.  As always on Excel (VBA) for Football Traders, the purpose is to equip you with the skills and knowledge, not simply to show you impressive Excel models.

In this first video, we consider how we might 'model' the number of home goals scored in an EPL game and use the question to explore some basic concepts in statistical modelling.  The idea of a 'distribution' is key, so we build one ourselves (after a 'pen-and-paper' demo!), then discuss some of the useful probability distributions that statistics offers us.  We also do a quick data analysis and run through how to create a chart to 'visualise' a distribution to allow us to analyse it, and consider the critical question: 'to what extent does this distribution represent what we wish to model?'

Topics And Techniques

- Probability Distribution
- Normal Distribution
- Uniform Distribution
- COUNTIF
- Column Chart
- Line Chart
- RANDBETWEEN
- RAND