ipredict - Football statistical predictions

[allen29]

Hello, 

I have been playing around with a new prediction model for all the Leagues that BBC posts match reports on (all professional English and Scottish Leagues).  The number of variables you can derive from the text commentary is quite good, especially for a lower leagues. It is still early phase, and I'm still tweaking some things. 

The final goal is to have a fully automated workflow that:

1) scrapes every new game from BBC, derives events from text (Shots, Bookings, Goals, Substitutions, Cards, Offside),

2) Aggregates the statistics for each game and applies Expected Goals (based on each individual shot, what is the probability that it should have been a goal) and Expected outcome models (based on the aggregated game statistics, what should have been the result).

4) Computes historical metrics for each team from game statistics 

5) Scrapes fixtures and odds from oddsportal (multiple bookmakers) and appends them to a database

6) Applies the prediction model, suggest recommendations and creates visualization. Currently I have only an Outcome model (1X2) but will also attempt including an Over/Under model and BTS model.

7) Posts predictions on a webpage (this is for the future, there is still a lot of work to be done)

8)Keeps track of Bankroll

I'm at about 95% of that (excluding 7), but I was hurrying because there are plenty of games today. 

Purpose:

I will monitor the results from the predictions here. From time to time may also be also posting visualizations and explanatory analysis of games. I also have Offensive and Defensive metrics for each team, so maybe they can tell a nice story. 

Results: From cross-validation results looked decent, (about 10% of games ended with a loss, median yield was about 5.5%) but I'll not get to excited because in the past I had the experience with a model that good results with cross-validation but did awful when using it. 

Odds, bookmakers: Currently I am scraping best odds from oddsportal, but in practice I will limit myself to: Pinnacle,Marathon,Matchbook

Bet selection: My threshold for recommending a bet is Bookmaker odd/My odd - 1 > 0.125. Only these bets are posted. But I can post all of them, but I need a more convenient solution because the images would become to large. Maybe I'll create an album for every league and embed the thumbnails here.

First round: Still working on visualizations, they were done in a hurry, quality and size needs to be optimized. Also, please suggest others ways of displaying the data if you have any ideas.

Does anyone knows how can I embed a table in the forum posts?  I think it is not practical to posts tables as screen captures.

 

 

Edited May 23, 2016 by allen29

[Matthew]

Good approach.

Can you post more info on the cross-validation you've done and the historical results, you give them little coverage in your post above.....