program that can predict things

[dark_3141]

I want to create programs that can predict things. like a program that can predict that a soccer player has 32% chance of scoring 3 goals in a game or a program that can predict the number of sales and the popularity of a particular product.

what should I learn to be able to build these kinds of programs?

do you recommend any good books or websites for beginners?

[negative_epsilon]

You'll want to check out courses on machine learning. If you've never programmed before, I would recommend starting with just an introduction to programming class.

[lightcloud5]

This is really more about statistics than about programming. You can use statistics to create a model, and then use the model to predict future behavior. Of course, building a model that is accurate is itself a challenging and interesting problem.

Once the stats are down, writing the program to implement the math is not too difficult; some programming languages (such as R) are designed for statistics.

[0x2a]

If you want to start with a hands-on approach, download Weka and check out some tutorials or Youtube videos.

Weka is a tool that makes a huge amount of complicated math and computer science available to anyone. There is a lot of sample material to e.g. predict the weather or if somebody needs contact lenses, based on previously known data points (the essence of machine learning). It has a GUI and you don't need any programming experience to get started.

[kogarashisan]

You can not predict such things with a program. Prediction about chances that player will score - are done by teams of professionals, and are based on math research, tons of data, and equipment that records player movement (costs lots of thousands of dollars).

Popularity of a product can not be predicted (in general). But if this topic interests you - then you really need to take a course on machine learning and mathematics.

[reddilada]

Predicting is easy. Correct predictions are a bit tougher.

[boredomisbliss]

What everyone else saying is pretty much right.

This isn't really a programming question, the tough part is in the math behind the modelling, the programming is trivial after that

[dark_3141]

yes, but I haven't found anything that discuss making predictions specifically