I know there are some smart people on this forum, so I hope someone can pass judgement on the following.
I have a large Excel file of flat races from the UK and Ireland. I run a number of VBA macros to simulate a variety of betting/laying strategies and then test the results. My most common test is use the chi-squared distribution to test that the ratio of wins to selections (strike rate) from a particular strategy is better than one that would be obtained by selecting a bet/lay at random.
I tried to use the Excel ChiTest function but couldn’t make it work from a VBA macro. Has anyone ever managed to make this function work from VBA?
To get round this I have approached the chi-squared test from the following angle. I calculate the square of the difference between the observed results (ratio of successful outcomes to selections) and the expected random results (ratio of successful outcome from randomly selected runner to number of randomly selected runners). I divide this by the expected outcome and then call the Excel ChiDist function with that value and 2 degrees of freedom, in order to determine the probability that the strike rate from the strategy is the sane as the strike rate from a random selection strategy.
I choose 2 degrees of freedom as I have 4 pieces of data – success from strategy, number of selections from strategy, success from random choice, number of random choices – that produce two statistics – strike rate from strategy and strike rate from random selection. That gives me 4- 2 , =2 degrees of freedom.
Would someone care to critique that approach?
Thanks in advance.
I have a large Excel file of flat races from the UK and Ireland. I run a number of VBA macros to simulate a variety of betting/laying strategies and then test the results. My most common test is use the chi-squared distribution to test that the ratio of wins to selections (strike rate) from a particular strategy is better than one that would be obtained by selecting a bet/lay at random.
I tried to use the Excel ChiTest function but couldn’t make it work from a VBA macro. Has anyone ever managed to make this function work from VBA?
To get round this I have approached the chi-squared test from the following angle. I calculate the square of the difference between the observed results (ratio of successful outcomes to selections) and the expected random results (ratio of successful outcome from randomly selected runner to number of randomly selected runners). I divide this by the expected outcome and then call the Excel ChiDist function with that value and 2 degrees of freedom, in order to determine the probability that the strike rate from the strategy is the sane as the strike rate from a random selection strategy.
I choose 2 degrees of freedom as I have 4 pieces of data – success from strategy, number of selections from strategy, success from random choice, number of random choices – that produce two statistics – strike rate from strategy and strike rate from random selection. That gives me 4- 2 , =2 degrees of freedom.
Would someone care to critique that approach?
Thanks in advance.
