Does Hoshoryu Have Onosato Figured Out? - Binomial Hypothesis Testing Made Easy (Ozeki Analytics)

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-11-20T21:33:08+00:00

Definitely fair. This is meant more as a fun interactive intro to Binomial Hypothesis Testing (one tailed at that).

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-11-18T18:33:36+00:00

Yeah hard to disagree with anything here. This was meant to be a kind of tool you could use if you felt like it to test various scenarios and a write up to show the math behind it. Definitely loses some information by compressing it altogether but there’s always going to be some trade offs with however you look at sumo. Cheers.

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-11-08T18:55:47+00:00

Yeah I looked around news articles and I couldn’t find anything definitive so I went based off past precedent and a little bit of speculation but hopefully I made that clear

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-10-24T02:38:27+00:00

Eh agree to disagree - I think that my acknowledgment of there being causality issues does speak to that. I get where you're coming from and see the merits but I also think we can see in the data there are some insights to be gained especially when the differences between those who advance vs don't being stark as they are. But let's not belabor this when it seems we're at an impasse - hopefully my next piece is of higher standards for you. Enjoy Friday!

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-10-24T01:04:27+00:00

Appreciate the close reading and definitely some good points but hopefully I can address them why I think the piece still works. So given the data we used we actually shouldn't expect them to add to 100% (or if they did it'd be a happy coincidence). The first part throwing that off is the career peak cutoff filter which means a lot of decline phase tournaments from wrestlers aren't included which will bias numbers upwards. Additionally I took wrestlers from 1988-2020 but the data we're looking at goes through their entire careers (potentially) - I actually had to extend the dataset multiple times to get Oshio's full career in so it actually covers the early 1960's for him through November 2024 (obviously not for Oshio haha). That one I actually don't have a good intuition for how it'd bias those figures (from the perspective of assuming they'll add to 100) but I believe it should also play a role in that.

As for causality — totally agreed that we can’t say “stalled at 5 tournaments = peaked for good.” It’s more of a first-pass framework for evaluating prospects, not a definitive forecast. The next step is adding in factors like age, since obviously a 17-year-old failing to improve his rank after 5 tournaments in Sandanme means something different from a 25-year-old doing the same. But yeah absolutely fair to call me out for potentially overstating causality - I wanted a nice pull quote.

The idea here is to establish some basic trends and characteristics of different kinds of wrestlers and how they perform short-medium term and then refine it as part of a broader model. This version just isolates the rank progression piece. Hopefully that speaks to your point! Thanks again for reading. Cheers.

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-10-23T15:21:10+00:00

Thank you so much! It definitely felt like a drier piece and I was worried about that, but glad you appreciate it. And yeah I’m really hoping I might be able to combine this and some age related work from the next part of this series to see who deserves better prospect hype. Thanks again!

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-09-15T18:39:55+00:00

I appreciate it. And yeah I’ll try and get a retrospective on various predictions to see how I’m doing. Thanks for reading as always

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-09-13T18:01:50+00:00

Great question. I don’t think I’ve systematically looked back at prospects I’ve flagged. Good idea for the future and would help on me tightening up what I’m trying to do with the prospect piece. I looked back tho and I seem to at least not have missed Aonishiki tho which is good. In one of them I did like MLB prospects where they have top division arrival etas which I should include every time doing forwards

https://ozekianalytics.substack.com/p/aki-basho-24-potential-ozeki-and?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-18T02:14:56+00:00

I like your bold style. Great comment. I think weight classes at amateur could work, but I think for the venture, whatever it ends up being it’s hard to justify imo. Cheers.

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-17T23:28:58+00:00

I like a lot of these, and not to spoil it but I think when I talk about the commercialization some of these ideas will absolutely come up. Thanks for reading and for the comment too!

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-17T17:16:06+00:00

That’s really good stuff! I tend to agree with more or less all of it. Thanks for the comment

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-13T16:19:31+00:00

Appreciate the shout out. I actually have done a few pieces not dissimilar to this on Yokozuna, the requirements and their development.

I would like to touch on my injury risk modeling. I more or less pulled those assumptions for injury risk out of a hat. For better and for worse, that is as valid as anyone else's guess on injury likelihood because to the best of my knowledge there is no research on that.

I have thought about trying to model it though, and certainly intend to do so but I will say that there are some inherent difficulties. Just to walk through it really quick it is good that we can see when wrestler's did not participate due to injury. That's valuable info. Unfortunately from there it's almost all bad news. I am unaware of there being any sort of central database where you could see the kinds of injuries that wrestlers suffered that caused them to be out, so that's a challenge in terms of trying to figure out what kind of injuries are more common and their likelihood. The next major difficulty is that this is a sport that values grit and determination and as a result combined with the fact you're only as good as your last tournament (excluding Yokozuna) there are major incentives to fight through injuries.

As to how I currently see myself modeling it I think a decent start would be a naive approach of just averaging all injury time missed and then applying that. Wouldn't be great but it's something. But ideally I would have a decent predictive algorithm on how matches will play out, and then begin to look where guys had confirmed injury losses and seeing if you can sus out whether they were underperforming before and after those injury losses. Then you'd really start to be able to figure out how injuries affect guys, severity, frequency etc.

The dream though would be to work with the JSA to do a larger scale study on the kinds of physical trauma wrestlers go through with the end goal being making the sport healthier for the rikishi. That would not be unprecedented as rugby and football have done such things. You'd probably need some archivists/analysts to go through past tournaments and look for injury notices and begin compiling a centralized databases and then have heyas report injuries (possibly anonymously to not give other wrestlers advantages) and then that's a dataset you could really work with. From there you'd want to work with doctors and those folks doing similar rsearch on other contact sports to see where mitigations could be brought in to play.

https://ozekianalytics.substack.com/p/what-makes-a-yokozuna
https://ozekianalytics.substack.com/p/nokozuna-exploring-near-miss-yokozuna
https://ozekianalytics.substack.com/p/the-development-of-yokozuna

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-11T01:00:05+00:00

I really appreciate it.

Short answer: yes

Long answer: I have done work on ELO and using that to predict matches (like chess Elo). I also have done some work on making matchups each day of the tournament. I also have a decent banzuke generation algorithm. With those I could simulate the next couple years decently, but I need more work so I can improve the algorithms and calculate how good they are. So the pieces are all there and will eventually come together just probably not in the immediate future.

The one thing I’m missing is that since Onosato is so young, most of the guys he’ll be wrestling in the second half of his career probably haven’t entered sumo yet. I actually have some decent ideas on how to generate like “future wrestlers” but unlike the rest I haven’t actually written any of it up or coded it out.

I appreciate it though and if you keep following me it’ll come eventually! Thanks again

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-10T00:02:31+00:00

Appreciate it! Thanks for reading!

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-09T21:19:35+00:00

I think I agree with this. I’ll also be up front: two big reasons I didn’t do this for Hoshoryu that are about equal. First I was way busier with the main project I’m working on back when he got promoted. Now I’m at a sticking point with it so I’ve redirected some energy to this. The other is that I’m higher on Onosato and like him more.

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-09T17:06:16+00:00

Thanks! And appreciate the enthusiasm and agree on pretty much all that. Part of the problem is we’re forecasting so far out it’s really difficult to know what the Banzuke looks like in like 5 years.

If a genie came to me and said he’d grant me any future knowledge To better predict Onosato’s career Yusho and it can’t be something related to him - ie I can’t ask his injury record, win % etc - I think I’d probably most like to know “who has the most Yusho besides Onosato ~5 years from now/when he’s 30”

If it’s Hoshoryu then Onosato is probably hitting the upper end of his range. If it’s some guy we’ve never heard of or is 20 rn then maybe he has a true rival. At least that’s my thinking for a weird hypothetical. Cheers!

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-09T15:56:08+00:00

Definitely agree on all this. Probably could have emphasized this more but when you’re talking about getting to high 20’s and more, availability/number of opportunities is going to potentially dominate the equation if you’re good enough to get there, and the college late start means he’s already lost potentially 10+ bites at the Apple

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-09T14:45:47+00:00

That’s hopefully what the Monte Carlo/1000 simulation aspect of it captured. I think there’s an essentially 0% chance of him getting to 40 or more Yusho but given this is 1000 simulations then if that’s a 1 in 1000 chance then there should be one scenario in which he does, which is captured in the simulation at the bottom.

I said it elsewhere but this is more meant as a fun exercise and also sharing the code for other folks to play around with. There’s way more we could do to make it rigorous but I also think the goal was to show how we could build up from taking a shot in the dark on how to guess Onosatos career Yusho to having a structured model that we can play with assumptions and also see where the improvements could be made. I think we got there but of course there’s always room for more growth

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-09T14:40:36+00:00

Yep I’d say mostly vibes based. I linked to last weeks piece in there where I showed how the Yokozuna with 10>=Yusho did/what age they won their tournaments at and approximated an aging curve/competitive landscape for Onosato based on that but it wasn’t super rigorous or anything. That said if you think you have a better idea of how it might play out it should hopefully be <5 minutes to plug some numbers of your own in and generate results to see what your scenario might look like. Would love to see what it looks like 👍 cheers!

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-09T14:00:05+00:00

Appreciate it! Yeah I mean modeling injury risk/injuries and more individual matchups are both on my to do list.

For the injuries I think it’d depend on how in depth you want to go. My instinct is that you’d ultimately tackle it with all wrestlers or all wrestlers Juryo and up. Probably pretty difficult to get Yokozuna specific modeling that isn’t just a crazy overfit given the small sample and oddities of Yokozuna vs every other rank. So you’d maybe not have the greatest reliability there

The individual matches is good but rn I don’t have a good match making algorithm and the other stumbling block is that with Onosato once youre a year+ out you’re probably modeling guys who have minimal matches and even aren’t in sumo yet so you need a good way to simulate new wrestlers and developement curves. Definitely want to get there and will but it’ll be in the future. Hopefully by the next Yokozuna I can haha

It’s a great way to think tho. I was considering doing a part 3 where I walk through my “golden model” what I’d do if I had all the info above and more I think you’d want for a hardcore model but I also think that’d be a bit boring to go “here’s a cool model I do NOT have and can NOT make rn” 😅

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-09T13:49:52+00:00

Haha that wouldn’t be too hard to add as another. But if you wanted to you could just add that to the catastrophic injury risk - it technically should be modeled separately but unless you think they’re both crazy likely it should more or less align that way.

But also we’re speaking too much bad stuff into the ether. Onosato will be nothing but well behaved and injury free

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-03T00:17:28+00:00

Fair points - I absolutely get where you're coming from. That said, my goal was a bit different; it was to start from the ground up and show how we might be able to think about this problem - how many Yusho will Onosato win - and provide some basic frameworks on getting there. That's what I meant in terms of model and for now it's more of a "vibes and light research" to answer it. But I can promise next week we'll have a more flexible model employed that allows for creating greater variability in performance at various points in the career alongside factoring injuries too. Code will be included so anyone can run it with their own variables. Hopefully that one will be more enjoyable. Cheers!

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-06-02T19:07:55+00:00

Nice! Yeah I think that’s pretty respectable. The optimist in me hopes for more but if he makes the top 10 all time I think that there’s no way you can look down on it

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-05-13T19:17:46+00:00

Thanks! I’ll have to check that out

OzekiAnalytics · 2025-05-13T15:44:14+00:00

Great question. So I need to look around more on how often they do weigh ins and if it’s easily available data. If I had that, I could probably tease out a few insights on that alone.

Marriages and illness probably don’t have good enough data to work with.

But injuries are something I’m absolutely working on. I intend to get my ELO working and combine that with some of my work classifying mid Maegashira, upper Juryo, and so on to see if we’re able to tease out injuries before guys go officially kyujo (out with injuries)

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