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Prediction of the FIFA World Cup 2018 – A random forest approach
- everdev 8y agoFull article: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611397/machine-learning-predicts-world-cup-winner/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611397/machine-learning-p...
- merb 8y agoI do not think that the germans are the top favorite. First of all, not a lot of teams won the cup twice in a row Second it's way harder if everybody is focused on you (because you won the last time) I'm pretty sure barley any data can reflect these two statements. (ok the first one can, but the second one is a more emotionell effect)
- alecco 8y ago> First of all, not a lot of teams won the cup twice in a row That is just because winning itself is low probability. But repetition is not a factor.
- mart187 8y agoNo Team actually has done it before...
- ajonnav 8y agoLooks like Brazil did in 1958 and 1962.
- thiagotomei 8y agoThat is not correct. * Italy won in 1934 and 1938 * Brazil won in 1958 and 1962
- usaphp 8y agoThey were saying the same about Real Madrid and champions league, and we all know how it turned out.
- anonymousDan 8y agoThere's a big difference between a 1 year cycle for the champions league and the 4 year cycle of a world cup in terms of player aging/form though.
- usaphp 8y agoThey won it 3 times in 4 years which I would say is pretty comparable to a World Cup timing
- OscarCunningham 8y agoCompared to betting odds (https://www.betfair.com/exchange/football/competition/5614746 https://www.betfair.com/exchange/football/competition/561474...) this approach thinks that Brazil is much less likely to win.
- avip 8y agoProjection: An octopus, or possibly another cephalopod, would outperform this RF predictor.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoIn fact, if you can get me (6^8) * (2^15) cephalopods, I am certain of it.
- taneq 8y agoI reckon a cephalopod would outperform it, even if it was unwell. I bet you sick squid.
- rndgermandude 8y agoRIP Paul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus
- DrScump 8y agoI, for one, welcome our new cephalopod overlords.
- ultrasounder 8y agoCTRL Fed the PDF and searched for Keyword "MESSI" and didn't find any. So obviously "Random" forests.
- caio1982 8y agoI always wonder if those people have tried to fit their approach to past results. Could they simulate past World Cup results to be sure their method is sane by using player/team's archived statistics?
- mycodebreaks 8y agoLike the advise on investment products - past performance is not an indicator for future returns.
- maaaats 8y agoNo, but the model should fit. Otherwise, why should it fit now?
- maxxxxx 8y agoExactly. Past performance is not everything but it certainly is a prerequisite for prediction the future.
- everdev 8y agoUnless they take into account modern things like travel time (was probably a bigger factor decades ago with fewer connecting and long-distance flights), ref nationality (used to be a huge point of contention for accusations of favoritism, now probably less so because of video), VAR (maybe some teams are better at getting away with dirty tricks than others, but now can't with video review), etc. I'm sure an accurate model has to be updated as culture and technology changes and impacts the game itself.
- avip 8y ago3.4 Combining methods [...] are now compared with regard to their predictive performance. For this purpose, we apply the following general procedure: 1. Form a training data set containing three out of four World Cups. 2. Fit each of the methods to the training data. 3. Predict the left-out World Cup using each of the prediction methods. 4. Iterate steps 1-3 such that each World Cup is once the left-out one. 5. Compare predicted and real outcomes for all prediction methods.
- sien 8y agoOh gawd. Please stop. The Economist is doing it. 538 has done one. Everyone is doing it. They all wind up with similar predictions. Germany, Brazil, France and Spain are favourites. This is what the betting odds, transfermarkt and the mean salaries of the teams also tell you. There are limits to prediction. The WC is a good place for people to learn that.
- vermontdevil 8y agoFor all the hype with World Cup and I love the event, it’s pretty much these 4 (Italy if they qualified) that has won the event. Last time a country outside of the big four(five) is Argentina back in 86 Makes for a bit of a dull ending sometimes.
- paulcole 8y agoIt's pretty rare that the championship is the best game/series in a tournament/playoffs. Look at the history of Super Bowls, NCAA tournaments, NBA playoffs, etc. More about the journey than the destination.
- sien 8y agoThe winner for an individual WC is hard to pick and there are usually 4-5 big teams that could win but they have changed a little bit. France hadn't won a WC and kept choking until 1998. Spain were the same until 2010. Italy and Argentina have been in and out of the favourites as well. England were #1 in Elo rankings in the late 1980s and got to the semis in 1990 and were only knocked out with the help of a handball in 1986. With a bit of luck Holland might also have been able to win a WC. Finals in 74, 78 & 2010. But outside a few big teams it is pretty unlikely that there will be a real surprise winner. There are too many big good teams so that one or two surprises isn't enough to win. For example South Korea shocked Italy in 2002 but then Germany beat them. Or Croatia beat Germany in 1998 but then got beaten.
- loblollyboy 8y agoArgentina is also part of that top (6) - they’re the Liverpool of international football.
- alecco 8y agoThis is a perfect example of abuse of ML. Last world cup ML predictions were a joke. I guess we won't learn the lesson. And if by chance any of these predictions work, we'll take it as a valid thing.
- dm8 8y agoI don't think any ML models can take into consideration the meltdown like Brazil vs. Germany in 2014 or player getting sent-off and changing the dynamics of the game. Football/soccer (along with field hockey) is much more unpredictable than any other team sport.
- imh 8y agoUncertainty and randomness are absolutely things that models take into consideration. That's the statistical part of statistical modeling. If unpredictability were a deal breaker, we wouldn't be able to model coin flips.
- dm8 8y agoYes, even I use random forest for some of the predictions at my new project. Somehow I feel doing statistical modeling for the sake of modeling/predictions is not the right approach. I'm still new (year or two exp.) into ML/statistical modeling so I'm much more conservative in my approach.
- imh 8y agoPredicting things and forecasting is an enormous part of ML and stats. Especially in the more statistical side of the community, there are very principled effective ways to do this, even in the presence of weird outliers like the germany/brazil meltdown. Take a look at robust regression and influence functions to see some of the interesting flavor of one way to look at outlier weirdness.
- Kpourdeilami 8y ago... or the infamous Zidane head-butt, Mardona's "hand of god", etc.
- adam 8y agoIn contrast, a fully human approach using a prediction market: https://alphacast.cultivateforecasts.com/challenges/167-2018-fifa-world-cup https://alphacast.cultivateforecasts.com/challenges/167-2018...
- billforsternz 8y agoTLDR; We don't know who's going to win either, maybe one of the really good teams?
- gd2 8y agoFIFA has the reputation of favoring the big market countries, and scandals happen. Did the model here include the probability of poor and biased referees? ? Anyway I'm looking forward to the World Cup, but wish it wasn't so early on the West Coast. The first matches I'm especially looking forward to Spain vs Portugal & Mexico vs Germany Should be fun !
- gus_massa 8y ago[Somewhat related] I remember that someone posted a worldcup simulator during the 2014 championship. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7941898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7941898 After playing a little with it, my takeaway was that the FIFA index is worthless (too political?) so I'd not pay attention to it. Also, the ESPN index was one of the better predictors, so I'd look almost only at it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- masteruvpuppetz 8y agoIn 2006 world cup I had predicted to colleagues that Italy will win just because I liked them. I stood by this throughout and viola! It happened. Last WC my prediction was Argentina (reached the final). I feel intuitions do matter. This time: Argentina again
- beyondCritics 8y agoI once had run my own prediction of the FIFA World Cup. I used elo ratings from http://eloratings.net/Europe http://eloratings.net/Europe which i converted into a model giving probabilities for any outcome between two teams. For each group A-F and for each possible pair of teams (a,b) in that group, i estimated the probability for them to qualify in that order using monte carlo simulation. Doing this explicitly should reduce overall estimation variance. Using that data i calculated the probaility for each team to become world champion using exact formulas. The results looked reasonable to me. What i have learned was, that the chances of extreme outsiders typically are extremly over estimated by the book makers. I have checked this paper for comparison (Table 8) and think the results are in line with my observation. I remember vaguely having heard, that there is a similar observation for stock options, which are extremly out of the money, there are typically much too expensive to buy. The bottom line is, never to bet on Korea or Japan getting FIFA world champion :-)
- hedonistbot 8y agoHow about betting on Greece winning the Euro?