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Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

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Re: Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

#21

Post by raverbashing »

People conflate statistics with actual results more often than not and I think those reporting on such stories and maybe even the original authors might fall for this.

It was not wrong to say Hillary had a 95% chance of winning the presidential election, but the confidence was low and that value still allowed for the opposite result to happen.

Also football has a lot of variance concerning team capability and end results. The better team might (and does) lose often, especially when going to penalty shoots.

With basketball, the stronger team will be easily scoring more in most cases.

Re: Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

#23

Post by anonu »

People love to beat up on these companies because of this stupid world cup prediction. Yes, Goldman is a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity (Matt Taibi quote). But it turns out it's really just great marketing for their research teams.

Also, I've seen some people say (not in this forum) that banks now look stupid because they're in the business of making predictions and they can't even get the world cup right. Guess what? Banks make no money on predictions. They make money on flows and taking spreads on trades they do with clients. Any research or prediction is meant to be a catalyst for that trade.

Re: Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

#24

Post by lagadu »

dmichulke wrote: post #2

I watched quite a few matches and among the things I saw in the matches but not in any statistics are: - motivation (Germany and Croatia were the two extremes here, no idea how to measure it) - team cohesion (number of articles in a few journals questioning the team cohesion, maybe also articles about individual players) - creativity in offense (maybe measurable via "target missed from close distance" + "ball passed…

> - creativity in offense (maybe measurable via "target missed from close distance" + "ball passed front of the goal")

This one would benefit possession-based teams, so it would fail to give decent odds to the current world and european champions (France and Portugal respectively) which don't play possession. Of course it's possible they're outliers but we'll never know.

Re: Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

#25

Post by systoll »

gtr wrote: post #9
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> far too much can rely on a few events that are basically a coin flip Can you give us some examples?

As there are relatively few goals, anything that can turn a goal into not a goal or vice versa can have a massive impact on the game. For example the penalty decision against Croatia in the final. Another thing that adds to the randomness is the chance that a key player may be sent off or injured.

To make that be specific -- in 44 of 64 games, and in every single penalty shoot-out, turning one goal into not a goal or vice-versa would've changed the outcome.

Re: Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

#26

Post by learnstats2 »

jasode wrote: post #18

Leonid Bershidsky and a lot of other journalists laughing at Goldman Sachs' incorrect predictions seem to miss the point. The World Cup predictions from Goldman Sachs (and also UBS) are a form of recreation and entertainment with machine learning. It's an expression of quant nerd humor. Analogous intellectual games would be engineers devising ridiculous Rube Goldberg contraptions[1] or programmers building "enterpris…

On the other hand, this is a predictive task that has defined outcomes and clear historical data - by my understanding, it is easier than commercial uses of machine learning [at least, easier to measure the effectiveness].

It's also Goldman Sachs and UBS choosing to attach their names to these and stake some reputation on these predictions. If they had hit the bullseye, they would be lauding these results.

Re: Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

#27

Post by megaman22 »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #6
boomboomsubban wrote: post #3

The World Cup is about the worst sporting event for data led predictions like this, far too much can rely on a few events that are basically a coin flip. It would be interesting to see how the predictions went for something like the Premiere League tables.

> far too much can rely on a few events that are basically a coin flip Can you give us some examples?

It's an incredibly low scoring sport with a single-elimination bracket. A fluke goal can swing the whole bracket.

In the NBA, NHL, or MLB, seven game series tend to even out the variance, so the best team usually wins. And even in NCAA basketball, there's enough scoring that any individual play loses significance.

Re: Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

#28

Post by kgwgk »

raverbashing wrote: post #21

People conflate statistics with actual results more often than not and I think those reporting on such stories and maybe even the original authors might fall for this. It was not wrong to say Hillary had a 95% chance of winning the presidential election, but the confidence was low and that value still allowed for the opposite result to happen . Also football has a lot of variance concerning team capability and end re…

> had a 95% chance [...] but the confidence was low

So she had 95% chance of winning with 50% probability or what?

Re: Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

#29

Post by kulu2002 »

Good... There was this discussion thread few days back on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17509407

Did this investment bank use same set of algorithms that they use for financial predictions?

...And then I remember there was this Octopus[1] who used to predict winners with 85% accuracy

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus

Re: Goldman Sachs model to predict World Cup game results didn’t come close

#30

Post by yk »

> And in any case, the model only generated probabilities of winning a game and advancing, and no team was given more than an 18.5 percent chance of winning the World Cup.

> [...]

> But Goldman Sach’s misfire is perhaps the most curious.

The model said, that there is a lot of uncertainty, and as it happens, it was entirely correct. A World Cup chance of 18.5 percent means, that 4 out of 5 times the team will not win, and that that is the highest chance does not say much about the model.

And in general this is one instance of the well practiced journalistic technique to wait for results first and then define a bar afterwards to criticize the results according to standards that did not exist when the performance happened. (I guess in this case it is even worse, we could construct a reasonable test of the model performed, I have the suspicion that that was in the original paper and that the journalist either did not understand it, or, more likely, choose to ignore it in favor of writing a better story.)

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