INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
By Fergal O'BrienSo much for the unpredictable nature of the beautiful game
reckons Brazil will win its sixth World Cup, basing its forecast on data mining, machine learning and econometrics.
The investment bank is
the latest to jump into the excitement before the soccer championship kicks off this week
It used 200,000 statistical models, sifted data on individual players and recent team performance and ran 1 million simulations of the
tournament.
As a result, it predicts that Brazil will lift the trophy on July 15
We should note that Goldman also tipped Brazil in 2014 (forecasting a 3-1 win over Argentina in the final)
more detail:
We feed data on team characteristics, individual players and recent team performance into four different types of machine
learning models to analyze the number of goals scored in each match
The models then learn the relationship between these characteristics and goals scored, using the scores of competitive World Cup and
European Cup matches since 2005
By cycling through alternative combinations of variables, we get a sense of which characteristics matter for success and which stay on the
We then use the model to predict the number of goals scored in each possible encounter of the tournament and use the unrounded score to
determine the winner-Goldman Sachs, June 2018Unsurprisingly, Brazil and Germany are the teams appearing most often in forecast models
Danske Bank also picked Brazil in its preview, which would give the South American team a record six titles, while Commerzbank sees Germany
lifting its fifth.
According to Goldman analysts, France has a slightly better chance of winning the event than Germany, but their model has
it meeting Brazil in the semi-finals, with its campaign ending there.
Like Goldman, both used a combination of variables and ran simulations
to forecast the winner, though Danske also factored in economic variables such as GDP per capita.
Swiss bank UBS also gives it to Germany,
while a study by the University of Innsbruck says Germany and Brazil will compete in the final, though it gives the latter the edge.
The
