By: Davis Balestracci
06/15/2015
To celebrate Father’s Day in the United States (June 21 this year), I’m going to use this and my next column to honor my late dad by using a game he loved—golf—to teach some very basic statistics lessons. Some of these may have been lost on you previously, not through some fault of your own, but rather from trainers’ tendency to concentrate on a technique’s mechanics. Analysis of means (ANOM) might be new to many of you, but even if it’s a review, I hope you have as much fun reading this as I did writing it.
The recent Masters tournament, in which 97 golfers participated, will provide the data. The Masters is the crème-de-la-crème of golf tournaments. One qualifies by winning a major tournament or by formal invitation. Past champions qualify automatically.
The first two rounds of any tournament are used to establish the “cut” to narrow the field for the last two rounds. Cut rule: Following the second round, the 50 golfers with the lowest scores, plus ties, plus any golfer within 10 strokes of the lead, advance to play the final two rounds. In this case, players with scores above 146 were cut, narrowing the field from 97 to 55.
Here’s the analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the first two rounds: