2013-01-18: NFL Conference Championship Predictions

The NFL Conference Championship games are this weekend and just one game separates the four remaining teams from Super Bowl XLVII. If you ignore the vapidity of the Te'o coverage, there is much discussion of how the loss of Rob Gronkowski will impact the performance of the Patriots this weekend. Aaron Hernandez should perform admirably and the entire team should be able to make up the difference and triumph. For our predictions we run a number of different types of algorithms in our research and compare the outputs. The three main algorithms that have consistently had the best performance are a Support Vector Model (SVM), a Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network, and a ranking algorithm. All three algorithms sided with the favorites. The SVM gives us a binary output, winner or loser. There is nothing in between. The SVM chose San Francisco and New England. The Neural Network output is a continuous variable that is supposed to be the margin of victory. A positive score fa