RhinoPars, Mon 6 Oct 01:19

Malcom Canmore - As for the Poisson distribution - it`s not about fish !

It is sometimes called the distribution of rare events, and goals in football are rare events. If you know the average number of goals scored per game you can calculate the chances of not scoring, scoring once, twice etc.. Even if we on average were to score two goals a game (what St Johnstone are doing) the chance of not scoring in a game is 13.5%. A drop of half a goal to an average of 1.5 goals /game has the chance of not scoring approaches 1 in 4 games (22.3%). Our current league average goals per game is 1.11 increasing our chance of not scoring any goals in a game to a third of the games (33.0%). My point was that even if one is playing well and scoring goals like St Johnstone there is still a reasonable chance of not scoring in a game.

Many years ago I used the Poisson distribution as part of the calculations in some Bayesian Mark-Recapture Population estimation software I developed to analyse individual black rhino sighting/re-sighting data that field rangers and monitors had collected in the bush. Using these sighting data one could estimate the number of black rhinos in a reserve (with confidence levels).

RhinoPars, Mon 6 Oct 08:32

🙂