Month: Jul 2018

Part one defined the basic architecture of the Team Strength MLP (multi layer perceptron). The training process and its monitoring via Tensorboard was explained in part two. Now it is time to take a look at the prediction of football matches. Primarily this consists of following steps:

• Load the prediction data set
• Re-build neural network architecture and load pre-trained weights
• Execute prediction

The Bundesliga season 2017/18 will be the test case for this example. The season 2008 – 2016 were used to train the mode.

Continue reading “Team strength MLP (part 3)”

The first part of this series covered the definition of the network architecture for my Team Strength MLP. This neural network must now be trained. To explain and visualize the training process, Tensorflow offers the web frontend TensorBoard. This post will explain, how you use TensorBoard and what are some basic indicators for a well-trained model.

Continue reading “Team strength MLP (part 2)”

It is time to build and test my first predictive model with Tensorflow! As I am currently totally unexperienced in creating and optimizing neural networks, I will start with a very simple one, which just uses the predictive variables of the Poisson model. By doing this, I will be able to compare the resulting network with the Poisson model. I am excited to see, whether Tensorflow is able to outperform this statistical model with such a low number of predictive variables. In this series I will provide some basic information, how you are able to build a simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) with Tensorflow, supervise the training process with Tensorboard and use the trained neural network to predict the outcomes of the matches.

Continue reading “Team strength MLP (part 1)”