Predictive analytics for sports betting
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.
Continue reading “Four things I have learned after using a neural network for 6 months”
There is one big reason, why I have chosen Exasol as a database for my football analytics and predictions: Exasol is capable of executing Python and R code inside the database. Your are able to put your statistical calculations and predictive models to your data. The feature User Defined Functions (UDFs) provides the possibility to implement every logic which you normally code in Python or R. This is a really efficient way to extent plain SQL with some predictive functionality like the execution of TensorFlow models.
In this blog post I will explain, how you extend the Exasol community edition with all needed Python3 packages to execute Tensorflow models. Additionally with the latest update I also added the packages and description needed for all my web scrapping scripts.
Continue reading “How To: Run TensorFlow in Exasol Community Edition”
With beginning of the new season in the Bundesliga I started to use my new predictive model “Team Strength MLP“. This model is no longer a statistical model like the Poisson model from last season. It is trained neural network. After the first 10 matchdays it is time to check the current result of my betting history.
Continue reading “Betting history: Bundesliga match days 1 – 10 / 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:
The Bundesliga season 2017/18 will be the test case for this example. The season 2008 – 2016 were used to train the mode.
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.
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.
After gaining much experience over a complete season, it is time to set myself some new goals. Until now I just used or tested predictive models, which were invented or described by other people. Now I want to try something new. I would like to create my first own predictive model, which should of course provide a better performance as the current Poisson model. This is where Tensorflow comes into play.
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.
Beat the Bookie 