Speaker: Marie Hardt, Graduate Student, Iowa State University

Title: A Hierarchical Approach to Modeling Golf Hole Scores with Hardy Distributions

Abstract: The Hardy distribution, derived by van der Ven (2012) and named after an idea by G. H. Hardy (1945), is a discrete probability distribution for modeling golf hole scores. We present four different hierarchical modeling strategies to jointly model the scores of multiple golfers on multiple holes during one golf tournament round using Hardy distributions. We then apply our new modeling strategies to golf hole scores from two very different kinds of golfers: male professional golfers on the PGA Tour and female high school golfers in Iowa.