Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 136 posts

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

#31

Post by chopin »

anonu wrote: post #23

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 wo…

I am pretty sure Banks make money on predictions if they get people on following them.

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

#32

Post by tomelders »

While I agree that it's somewhat silly to try and predict a word cup winner like this (and I suspect it was just a bit of fun anyway), there is one other reason that could explain why all these attempts got it so wrong.

Cheating.

Before people start booing, let's not forget where this tournament is being held, and all the other nefarious things that country has been up to recently.

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

#33

Post by raverbashing »

kgwgk wrote: post #28
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?

it is captured in the 95% but that was probably a bit overestimated (and there are always unknown biases and improbable events can happen)

What's wrong is thinking 95% chance of winning means they will win

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

#34

Post by frockington »

kgwgk wrote: post #28
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?

60% of the time, it works every time - Brian Fantana

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

#35

Post by msravi »

Duh. Looks like there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how statistics works all around. The probability of an event does NOT predict a particular outcome. Ever. It only says that if the experiment is performed again and again and again, like a few thousand times, then X% of those will match that probability.

If I toss a fair coin you cannot predict the next outcome. You can only say that if I toss the coin a 1000 times, then close to 500 are going to turn up heads, and another 500 are going to turn up tails.

It was stupid of Goldman Sachs or whoever to predict an outcome. It was stupid of anyone else to lend credence to that prediction.

Hopefully, Goldman Sachs is not relying on prediction of singular outcomes to make their investment decisions. I don't think they are. Probably just marketing brouhaha to ride the soccer wave. Although I'm not sure if that worked as expected.

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

#36

Post by jasode »

anonu wrote: post #23

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 wo…

>Banks make no money on predictions. They make money on flows and taking spreads on trades they do with clients.

You're mostly right but to further clarify, an investment bank like Goldman Sachs has revenue from mostly "market making" spreads but it does also have activities that depend on predictions such as their proprietary trading (before the Volcker Rule shut them down) and their GSAM (Goldman Sachs Asset Management) fund. The GSAM is basically a hedge fund for their wealthy clients' money. They will run predictions on macro trends on data like interest rates, commodities, indexes, etc to help them pick stocks for their portfolio.

As the pdf noted, the World Cup data models and simulations came from Adam Atkins of GSAM.

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

#37

Post by teamk »

tomelders wrote: post #32

While I agree that it's somewhat silly to try and predict a word cup winner like this (and I suspect it was just a bit of fun anyway), there is one other reason that could explain why all these attempts got it so wrong. Cheating. Before people start booing, let's not forget where this tournament is being held, and all the other nefarious things that country has been up to recently.

FIFA has been corrupt for decades. Although supposedly its been cleaned up since Blatter was removed, it is doubtful the institutional corruption has been eliminated completely. The only question is how pervasive it is.

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

#39

Post by fwdpropaganda »

kryptiskt wrote: post #12
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?

For example: Croatia got to the final via two penalty shootouts, which is very much like coin flipping.

Can't you put probabilities on that though? What you said is basically "impossible to predict, because one or the other might score more goals, so it's like coin flipping."

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

#40

Post by pbhjpbhj »

yk wrote: post #30

> 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,…

Uncertainty is a truism; that's why people want to use a prediction algo. Did the system so better on results it was more certain about?

Predicting the result of an A or B contest the bar is already defined. Either the system gets it right or doesn't, if it gets it right more often than not then (despite this being poor grounds mathematically, on a small result pool) popular press will report it as successful.

IMO if matches become easy to predict then rules will change to reduce that predictability.

Post reply on HN