Betting probability

One of the central applications of linear algebra is in statistics. Data fitting problems can be reformulated as projection problems. One of the reason to fit data is to understand the data better or even to make predictions. If there is a trend, then very likely this trend is going to continue. But this is not necessarily the case and often, it is difficult to actually predict the future. This was illustrated in the Superbowl game of last weekend, where the odds of winning for the Patriots was very low. Then came the turn. An image of the Washington Post illustrates this. It displays the probability which was assessed for a Patriot win of the game at each moment of the game. You see that the probabiliy was almost zero between half time and the end of the 3rd quarter. There had been a particularly interesting moment at the end of the game, where a coin toss decided who would start. At that moment, the probability was assessed to be 50 percent.

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(Thanks to Paul Hermany to send this link.)