Pavan Akula, Nnaemezue Obi-eyisi, Ilya Kats
The goal of the project is to predict the outcome of a soccer match. We aim to identify best features to use for analysis and prediction. Professional bookies reach about 53% precision with their predictions, and our goal is similar results. Based on project’s progress we may look into several criteria - winning percentage, goal differential, home vs. away performance.
Sports betting is a big business and soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Reliable predicting is a lucrative proposition not only to the sports betting industry but also to the organizations looking to build a winning team.
We plan to use sports data provided via Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/hugomathien/soccer). It covers over 25K matches, 10K players, from 2008 to 2016 for 11 European countries. Analysis methods are to be decided.
The output may include an application to compare features, to provide past performance, and to give the ability of predict results of future matches (Word Cup 2018 here we come!)