Week 2

 

A bit late with my blog post for this week. We got hit pretty hard by the storm on Thursday and lost both power and internet. Thankfully power was restored early Friday morning but four days later, we are still without internet service. Have a technician coming out tomorrow, so hopefully that gets resolved. Not having internet access while taking online classes is problematic to say the least. But I digress.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Posta. We discussed what the internship will entail in greater detail he got me started with some further readings on the model we will be using for this project.

Soccer is generally a low-scoring sport. This can be inherently problematic when attempting to create a model that can accurately predict match outcomes. Interestingly, the model doesn’t place as much weight on match scores as one might initially think. Take for example a match where team A defeats team B 2-0. In this match, team A has 2 shots on goal and scores on both shots, while team B has 8 shots on goal yet none of these shots convert to goals. While in this match team A converted 100% of its shots on goal to points, we do not expect this to be the case over a large sample size. Likewise, despite the fact that in this match team B converted 0 of its shots on goal to points, over a larger sample size, team B will convert a certain percentage of these shots on goal into points. The model takes many such factors into consideration for its prediction.  

Additionally, the readings also introduced me to a few concepts of probability theory and statistics, including Poisson distribution and Monte Carlo simulations. Anyhow, I am beyond excited to continue to delve deeper into this project and hopefully, building a successful model!