Viewing profile — lum

Hi HN, together with colleagues from EPFL I developed a new statistical model that can be used to (a) understand & visualize the skill of sports teams and players, and (b) to predi…

Thanks! Regarding the Kelly Criterion—that's a great idea, I'll look into it! I think we were off to a good start after Morocco vs Iran (for which we had significantly different pr…

Yes, exactly!

Short technical explanation: We've extended a pretty cool skill-based model of comparison outcomes called TrueSkill Through Time [1], developed by Microsoft Research. Compared to T…

Thanks a lot for the comments! - about friendly games: agreed, in the future we'd like to downweight them (as well as downweight older games over newer ones) - about substitutions:…

Yes, for now we only predict win / lose. It is fairly reasonable to assume that draws are more likely to arise if the winning probabilities are close to 50/50 (and less likely if t…

You're right. We took Wales' last lineup, but it will very probably be a different lineup against Slovakia. We'll update the prediction shortly before the game, when we know who's …

We did some preliminary experiments in this direction. Basically, we tried to do a regression on the score difference instead of using only binary outcomes. In our experiments it d…

Excellent point - this one is definitely on our todo list. There are several simple extensions of the Elo model that take draws into consideration (i.e., give a non-zero probabilit…

We scraped it from soccerway.com.

You are correct about Portugal, not exactly the squad that will likely play against Iceland. We used the starting lineup of the last official game (I believe in this case it was Po…

For those who are interested in the details: we model the strength of teams using the well-know Elo model (used e.g., for official chess ratings). We innovated on two aspects of th…