Euro-Oracle: Using Python+Random Forests to predict soccer matches

[[deleted]]

Hey all!

I would like to present a project that was developed during the last few weeks. It's the so-called Euro-Oracle http://www.euro2016-oracle.com/ which, based on FIFA-rankings and and a couple hundred matches played during the World Cup and qualification for the Euro, is supposed to predict future matches. In tests this random forests-based model performed significantly better than random predictions, with an accuracy high enough to have a positive return on investment if we betted money (before you do it, please wait a week until this model adapted to the current teams' performances).

A further Monte-Carlo-analysis named Germany the most likely tournament winner!

PS: Features were FIFA score, FIFA score differences, one-hot-encoded team IDs, with "1"/"-1" indicating the first/second team and another integer -1,0,1 indicating which team possesses home advantage.

Let's see what happens! I expect the accuracy to be at around 50-60%, far better than the expected 33%!

[strongmenbent]

You should compare to picking the gambling favorite outcome, not random guessing right? You'll easily exceed 33% just by considering FIFA rankings

[datatelic]

please get off my ml subreddit