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Tibco's Spotfire Predicts . . . Siena?

Bracketology is clearly an obsession. I've written so far about two different applications written to help people fill out their March Madness brackets. (I know I keep saying this, but don't forget to join the InformationWeek bracket). This is about a third program, this one built by the Spotfire team at Tibco. Spotfire is an enterprise analytics platform that specializes in interactive visualization.

Another one is called BracketBrains, built by some Stanford grads and noted by someone commenting on this blog. I haven't tried it yet, but it appears to factor in a fairly robust set of values, including Distance From Home and Vegas Spread. You can get to it here.

Don't forget to sign up for an account with CBS Sportsline here, so you can then fill out an InformationWeek bracket here (password is biztech).

For other coverage on the technology and fun behind March Madness, go here.

Tim Wormus is the Analytics Evangelist (who wouldn't want that title?) at Spotfire and he and some of the team wrote this application, called Spotfire Test Drive, to show off some of its prowess, but also because they are sports junkies. It is essentially an interactive visual dashboard with stats starting from the 2001/2002 season tournament through this year. What it does is examine relationships between past Final Four teams and championship winners and this year's crop of participants to help you pick your Final Four.

Wormus said that he feeds RPI data into the system, focusing on things like strength of schedule, conference information, tournament seed, winning percentage, and other data pulled straight from the NCAA site.

While the DanceCard and ScoreCard applications (written about in this space previously) use a pretty sophisticated statistical model and tons of data, they doesn’t allow for interactivity, according to Wormus.

The goal with Spotfire Test Drive was to create something where the user can determine for themselves the important criteria and try their own models in an ad hoc fashion; Wormus emphasized that it's not about people developing their own statistical models, but using various values and exploring the data and filtering the data in ways they like.

Spotfire offers an analytics environment for the normal person. To prove the point, this was a quickly developed application. Wormus got all of the data Sunday night and made it available Monday and it's easily consumable by users.

The team with profile most like last year's Florida Gators is ... Siena, making it Spotfire's Cinderella (you may recall that, based on mascot ratings, I also picked Siena). However, the Final Four is an interesting mix: Duke, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Texas. Not bad, with really only Vanderbilt as a surprise.

Once again, you heard it here first.

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