Hi all,

Figured i'd spark another thread on here and get some conversation happening. In this thread I want to discuss ratings and more specifically weighting the individual factors that are taken into account.

I'm not really interested in discussing what factors to consider or what ones people think are more/less important. What i'd like to discuss is how people do/would approach the weighting of each factor.

For example you might start out with a ratings approach where every single factor is weighted to 10 points. So the horse with the best place % gets 10 points, the horse with the best API gets 10 points etc etc and it scales down from there for each horse in the race. What i'm wondering/asking is either how people approach or what they think the best way is to weight these factors from a mathematical point of view to get the best out of your factors in a final rating.

The approach I'm taking at the moment is something close to the following description but i'd like to know if others have some input and/or ideas:

First I take the strike rate for each factor based on 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th. I then multiply each strike rate by 4, 3, 2 and 1. For example the top sky rater has the following positional strike rates:

1st - 22.0%
2nd - 19.2%
3rd - 16.4%
4th - 8.9%

(0.220 * 4) + (0.192 * 3) + (0.164 * 2) + (0.089 * 1) = 1.87

I do this for all the factors, then divide them all by the highest score so they are on a 0 to 1 range (i.e. 0% to 100%)

Next I look at the POT of each factor. Majority factors are negative in their own right so what I do is take the lowest POT and boost all other POT's by that amount. i.e. if the lowest is -31%, this would be re-calculated to 0% and a -25% POT would be re-calculated to 6% and so on. Once these are all re-calculated I do the same as the strike rate and adjust so they are on a 0% to 100% scale.

Finally I like to look at what the profit divided by the highest dividend for that factor comes out to as it shows the consistency of that factor. However as majority of the single factor profits are negative I 'boost' them in the same way as the POT calc using the lowest factors profit. Once this is done and I divide the new profit figure by the highest dividend, I adjust to the 0% to 100% scale as well.

once these 3 scales are completed for SR, POT and Profit/MaxDiv I then simply weight these scores for a total figure such as:

(3 x POT outcome) + (2 x P/MaxDiv outcome) + SR outcome

This gives a final score and you simply weight the factors based on this score. I hope the above isn't too hard to understand (let me know if you have questions). This is just the way I approach it at the moment when looking at how to adjust the factors to get a final rating that is more significant then rating all factors the same.

My approach doesn't really have any mathematical significance etc besides me just approaching it on what I believe is more important. Hopefully someone can offer are more structured approach thats more mathematically sound? If not i'm happy to continue with this method but just wondered what ideas other people had.

Cheers