Of course I don’t write all these blogs and create the different models just for fun. Of course I am using my data and my models for betting. So I thought, it would be a good idea to explain my process of selecting bets based on my predictions.
Continue reading “Betting with numbers – How I select my bets”Scoring functions vs. betting profit – Measuring the performance of a football betting model
“What’s the best model?” – That’s a very important questions, when creating, training and testing new predictive models for football. Various machine learning algorithms and packages offer by default a set of scoring functions like accuracy, log-loss, brier score or ROC-AUC, which measure the accuracy of a probabilistic prediction. But I already recognized in older posts, that the best model based on a scoring function, was not always the best model, when it’s about using the prediction results for betting. So let’s have a look and compare the rank of some scoring functions in comparison to the betting profit of some models.
Continue reading “Scoring functions vs. betting profit – Measuring the performance of a football betting model”From Business Analytics to Sports Analytics
Before I started analyzing data for sports betting I have worked as a Business Intelligence (BI) consultant in different industries. During this time I learned how Business Analytics helps you to improve your business performance by analyzing data. This also helped me to understand, what’s needed to improve the performance of a sports team or the betting performance of a punter with the help of data.
Continue reading “From Business Analytics to Sports Analytics”Article at DOAG Business News
Everyone, who follows my blog, will have noticed, that I did not published any post for a long time. This was because I first could publish my first article for the DOAG Business News and after that had two presentations at the DOAG conference.
How To: Install TensorFlow for Windows
I currently started to test machine learning algorithms to predict the results of football matches. I especially tried to use neural networks. But I soon realized, that the possibilities of R regarding neural networks are a little bit limited. So I want to take a look at TensorFlow. TensorFlow is a machine learning library provided by Google, which was already used for many different use-cases and proved its suitability.
As the installation process for TensorFlow was not self-explanatory, I thought, it would be a good idea to provide a small installation guide. I want to explain, how I installed TensorFlow and the Python GUI PyCharm.
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.
Analytical Architecture: TripleA DWH
As described in How to beat the bookie: Value Betting I want to use Value Betting to beat the bookie. To identify value, I have to be able to calculate the probability of a specific sports event (e.g. Home-Win for Team A) as accurately as possible. Therefor, I have to develop, test, simulate and process different predictive models.  As a DWH architect I know, that a good data architecture helps a lot to support such a developing process. That’s why I formed the concept of the TripleA DWH – the Advanced Agile Analytical Data Warehouse – a data architecture aimed to automate data science processes.
How to: convert betting odds
While learning something about sports betting, it is essential to compile betting odds to probabilities and probabilities to betting odds.
How to beat the bookie: Value Betting
There are many ways to beat a bookie. One of the well known methods is arbitrage betting, where you try to find price differences between different bookies. Some years ago this was a really good method, but today, as every single information about sports is available throw the internet, it is hard to find difference between bookies.
I will mainly focus on the so-called Value Betting. But what is Value Betting and how does it work?
Beat the Bookie 