NCAA Tournament 2013 odds: Nate Silver’s region predictions

FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver, whose strikingly accurate forecasts of the 2008, 2010 and 2012 national elections garnered widespread acclaim and confusion from closed-minded observers, tweeted his Final Four odds late Sunday night.

Silver said they were preliminary odds and he had not double-checked them before sending them out. He also did not disclose his methodology which, for his election forecasts, is complex and will not be paraphrased in this space.

Silver tweeted his odds for the winner of each regional.

Silver’s accuracy in predicting elections has become well known; he got all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the 2012 presidential election, and he aced 49 states and D.C. in the 2008 presidential election. Fans of teams in the East Region may be pleased to hear the one state he missed in his two forecasted elections was Indiana, his pick to win the East region.

Silver’s career in statistics began in sports. He developed PECOTA, a system to predict short-term performance and career paths of Major League Baseball players based partially on matching a player’s past performance to that of a player who preceded him. Silver sold PECOTA to Baseball Prospectus in 2003 and managed the system for Baseball Prospectus until 2009. While still at Baseball Prospectus he began making election predictions under a pseudonym, Poblano.

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