We investigate the origin and the validity of common beliefs regarding “the hot hand ” and “streak shooting ” in the game of basketball. Basketball players and fans alike tend to believe that a player’s chance of hitting a shot are greater following a hit than following a miss on the previous shot. However, detailed analyses of the shooting records of the Philadelphia 76ers provided no evidence for a positive correlation between the outcomes of successive shots. The same conclusions emerged from free-throw records of the Boston Celtics, and from a controlled shooting experiment with the men and women of Cornell’s varsity teams. The outcomes of previous shots influenced Cornell players ’ predictions but not their performance. The belief in the hot hand and the “detection ” of streaks in random sequences is attributed to a general misconception of chance according to which even short random sequences are thought to be highly rep-resentative of their generating process. G 1985 Academic Press. Inc. In describing an outstanding performance by a basketball player, re-porters and spectators commonly use expressions such as “Larry Bird has the hot hand ” or “Andrew Toney is a streak shooter. ” These phrases express a belief that the performance of a player during a particular period

design IRT embodies a view of induction as a four-phase process (shown in Figure 1). The process alters a current model by generating a group of new competitor models, fitting those competitor models to data, comparing the competitors to each other, and then testing the statistical significance of the competitors. The process is iterative --- it can be repeated until no competitor can be found that is significantly better than the current model. current model generate competitors fit competitors compare competitors test significance Replace current model with competitor any competitor significantly better? No Yes continue searching? accept current model No Yes Figure 1: IRT's inductive process Generating competitors creates one or more models with a different structure than the current model. Examples include creating decision trees with different attributes and structure or classification rules with different conditions and operators. Each of these competitors is a candidate to replac...

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