After I realized my available data is definitely not enough to beat the bookie, I decided to start a new data journey and take a look at some more advanced statistics. And what could be better suited as Expected Goals (xG). This statistic is used more and more to explain this specific luck / bad luck factor, you feel, when watching a football match. In the first part of this journey I will explain, what are xG and what they tell you about a football match. Continue reading “xG data journey – What are ExpectedGoals?”
Four things I have learned after using a neural network for 6 months
This time, after over 20 matchdays in the German Bundesliga, I don’t want to take a look at the predicted results. I used my Team Strength MLP now for about 6 months. During this time I analysed the predictions and tried to learn some more stuff about deep learning. So let’s summarize some lessons I have already learned and what could be improved for my model for the next season.
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MACD analysis: Man City – Liverpool (03.01.2019)
The 2018/19 season in the Premier League started entirely normal. After a record-breaking season Manchester City was of course favoured to win again the title with Liverpool just having an option as the runner-up. But things changed in December and, according to both coaches, we can expect the match between “the best team in the world” and “the best team in the world”.
So which match could be more usefull to take a look at the MACD analysis for both teams and get a better feeling how this type of analysis can be used to identify the performance trend of a team.
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Weighted predictor variables and performance trend analysis
The first 10 matchdays of the current season in the Bundesliga revealed some clear disadvantages of my Poisson model. The predictor variables attack and defence strength respond too slowly to performance changes of single teams. This was clearly shown by the loss produced by the poorly performing FC Cologne. A normal SMA (simple moving average) does not use a weight. So latest results, which represent the current form, have not a higher priority over older results. As I looked for solution for this problem I stumbled over the EMA (exponential moving average). This post will explain the use of the EMA and how you can implement it inside the Exasol, so that it is usable as an analytical function for the predictor variables. On top I will show you, how you can analyse the team performance with help of MACD (Moving Average Convergence/Divergence oscillator ).
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How To: Develop predictive models
No matter what predictive model you want to build, you have to go through several steps. You find many different approaches to describe such a development process for statistical models or predictive models in the internet. I have chosen a relative simple one, which is based on papers for a SAS training.
Beat the Bookie 