Help with Regression Analysis

[Italian Stallion]

This is a non basketball question, but it could easily become one in the future because I keep some basketball stats also.

I have an Access database of horse racing information that can easily be exported to Excel or other data formats. In the database I have information on thousands of horse races keyed by Current Track, Current Date, Current Race, and Horse. Each horse has a bunch of fields associated with it that describe its last race prior to a current race (finish position, beaten lengths, class rating, speed rating etc...) It also has the ultimate finish position for each horse in that current race.

What I would like to do is look at the fields for each horses' last race and figure out how much to weight each one so that it maximizes the number of 1st place finishers that were picked from all the races.

I was told that Excel can do regression analysis like this. I am fairly familiar with Excel, but not with this kind of analysis. If there's a better option, let me know. I am looking for any direction possible.

[Crow]

This guy https://mobile.twitter.com/octonion?ref ... r%5Eauthor knows the horses and math applied to the horses, professionally. I dunno if he'd help. If you approach right, maybe. Or, not.

[Italian Stallion]

Thanks. That's a good start.

[GK5]

If you are trying to do a simple linear regression, then it is probably easier to just run it in R.

This may help. http://www.statmethods.net/stats/regression.html