Short technical explanation: We've extended a pretty cool skill-based model of comparison outcomes called TrueSkill Through Time [1], developed by Microsoft Research.
Compared to TrueSkill, our model is able to learn the dynamics of football teams' skill in a more flexible way, and therefore we achieve slightly more accurate predictions. It also makes for great visualizations!
For those of you who know the Elo rating system: our model is similar but beats Elo by ~10% [2]
Our goal is to use the kickoff.ai platform to continuously evaluate and improve our models. We hope to become the FiveThirtyEight of football! [3]
Links to our Euro 2016 model & show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11868863
http://euro2016.kickoff.ai
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/trueski...
[2] in terms of log-loss, compared to a baseline that gives probability 1/3 to each outcome.
[3] Actually, FiveThirtyEight also has football predictions (albeit only for club competitions): https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/soccer-predictions/
Compared to TrueSkill, our model is able to learn the dynamics of football teams' skill in a more flexible way, and therefore we achieve slightly more accurate predictions. It also makes for great visualizations!
For those of you who know the Elo rating system: our model is similar but beats Elo by ~10% [2]
Our goal is to use the kickoff.ai platform to continuously evaluate and improve our models. We hope to become the FiveThirtyEight of football! [3]
Links to our Euro 2016 model & show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11868863 http://euro2016.kickoff.ai
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/trueski...
[2] in terms of log-loss, compared to a baseline that gives probability 1/3 to each outcome.
[3] Actually, FiveThirtyEight also has football predictions (albeit only for club competitions): https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/soccer-predictions/