The Institute for Statistics and Mathematics is pleased to invite you to the next research seminar, taking place on campus:

Andreas Groll (Faculty of Statistics, TU Dortmund University)
A Hybrid Random Forest Approach for Modeling and Prediction of International Football Matches
Friday, June 16, 2023, 10:30 am, Building D4, Room D4.0.127

Abstract:
Many approaches that analyze and predict the results of international matches in football/soccer are based on statistical models incorporating several potentially influential features with respect to a national team's sportive success, such as the bookmakers' ratings or the FIFA ranking. Based on all matches from the four previous FIFA World Cups 2002-2014, we compare the most common regression models that are based on the teams' feature information with regard to their predictive performances. Furthermore, an alternative modeling class is investigated, so-called random forests, which can be seen as mixture between machine learning and statistical modeling and are known for their high predictive power.
Within the framework of Generalized Linear Models (GLMs), the most frequently used type of regression models in the literature is the Poisson model. It can easily be combined with different regularization methods such as penalization or boosting.
Our main focus, however, is on the incorporation of so-called hybrid predictors, i.e. features which were obtained by a separate statistical model. We are particularly interested in how those can improve the predictive performance of the models.
For these different modeling techniques, the predictive performance with regard to several goodness-of-fit measures is compared. Based on the estimates of the best performing method all match outcomes of the FIFA World Cup 2018 in Russia are repeatedly simulated (1,000,000 times), resulting in winning probabilities for all participating national teams.
Finally, we shortly sketch how we have progressed in this research line since the FIFA World Cup 2018.

We aim to stream all on-campus talks via Zoom. A direct link to the stream will be posted on our website.

For further information and the seminar schedule, please see:
www.wu.ac.at/en/statmath/research/resseminar