Show HN: World Cup 2018 Predictions with Bayesian ML | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: World Cup 2018 Predictions with Bayesian ML

kickoff.ai

26 pointslum8 comments

Short technical explanation: We've extended a pretty cool skill-based model of comparison outcomes called TrueSkill Through Time [1], developed by Microsoft Research.

Compared to TrueSkill, our model is able to learn the dynamics of football teams' skill in a more flexible way, and therefore we achieve slightly more accurate predictions. It also makes for great visualizations!

For those of you who know the Elo rating system: our model is similar but beats Elo by ~10% [2]

Our goal is to use the kickoff.ai platform to continuously evaluate and improve our models. We hope to become the FiveThirtyEight of football! [3]

Links to our Euro 2016 model & show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11868863 http://euro2016.kickoff.ai

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/trueski...

[2] in terms of log-loss, compared to a baseline that gives probability 1/3 to each outcome.

[3] Actually, FiveThirtyEight also has football predictions (albeit only for club competitions): https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/soccer-predictions/

Awesome project, I love the use of TrueSkill Through Time here! Really interesting that it beats out Elo as well.

FiveThirtyEight actually posted their WC predictions earlier today [1]. Finding where the two models diverge is a fun exercise -- they have Morocco as a 40% favorite tomorrow while your model has Iran as a 46% favorite.

It would be interesting to test the model by applying the Kelly Criterion [2] when you have an odds advantage to a fake initial $1000 bankroll and seeing where you end up at the end of the tournament.

If Iran does end up being a 46% favorite tomorrow then that Kelly test will start to look really good, really quickly - the market is only giving Iran a ~25% chance right now!

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-world-cup-predicti...

[2] http://www.elem.com/~btilly/kelly-criterion/ for the background, http://www.albionresearch.com/kelly/ for a useful calculator

Thanks! Regarding the Kelly Criterion—that's a great idea, I'll look into it!

I think we were off to a good start after Morocco vs Iran (for which we had significantly different predictions and got it right), but lost quite a bit with Danemark vs Peru (we had Peru as favorite).

It will be interesting to see the Portugal v Spain result, now the manager has been sacked.

Looks really good and I love this stuff. Great work!

What did you predict for ARG v ISL?

I think it was:

ARG 73% to win for a draw 19% ISL 8% to win

Yes, exactly!

Sweet project!

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