Prediction results for 2017

Posted on January 28, 2018

I made 35 predictions last January, and judgement day has come. Well, technically is was the 1st, but I’m writing this today. I’ll use evidence as of the 1st where possible. I’m inverting some of them so all the predictions are ≥ 50%.

Politics

Technology

Personal life

Personal work

Media

Analysis

My cross entropy score was 0.807 (range 0 - infinity), my Brier calibration was 0.0204 (range 0 - 1), my Brier refinement was 0.1496 (range 0-0.25) and my overall Brier score was 0.1701 (range 0-1). For all of those metrics, lower numbers are better. I was overconfident for the buckets from 50% to 85% and underconfident for 87% to 95%. Here’s a calibration chart: calibration chart

The red line is perfect calibration, my buckets are in blue.

I’m not really sure what lessons to draw from this. In future, I’m not going to do this on a yearly basis - it’s much better to get feedback quicker and more often that once a year. I may start using PredictionBook, though annoyingly they compute Brier scores but not the decomposition into components.

Technology was my worst category by cross-entropy - 1.3793. The breach prediction and the jobs predictions were worst. In the TF jobs one I was very overconfident. There are a lot of postings for the `machine-learning tag, but not for TF specifically. I think I overestimated how much employers care about specific libraries and how complicated industrial ML work is. The Haskell prediction I talked about above.

My second and third worst were the personal categories. I was overoptimistic about project difficulty, succumbing to the planning fallacy even though I’m supposed to know better, and I underestimated how much time and energy professional work would take up. Which is not to say it was a bad year, I really like my job. My RSI seems to be getting better so perhaps I’ll be able to spend time on personal projects in 2018.

(Spreadsheet here.)

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