Week 3

 

This past week I met with Dr. Costa to quickly go over any additional questions I might have about the background readings he gave me to get started. After that, we moved on to the real fun, building my first model.

He had me start with a simple model using only xG (expected goals) to predict the possible outcomes of a match between the Phoenix Rising and the San Diego Loyal. I started out by collecting information for the last 10 matches each team played and created an Excel spreadsheet with that information. While I would consider myself computer savvy, I don’t have extensive experience with Excel. I know enough to get around Excel, but I also know Excel is a very powerful tool and there are a ton of shortcuts to make work and life more efficient in Excel. I hope that as I spend more time on this project, I get to know the ins and outs of Excel. For now, I guess I will continue feeling like my dad does when trying to figure out how to add an attachment to an email…

With the data collected, I moved on to building a model to predict the probability of different outcomes for the match. First, using Poisson distribution I calculated the probability of each team scoring between 0 and 5+ goals. With that information, we can determine the probability of the different outcomes of the game by multiplying the probability of team A scoring x goals and team B scoring y goals. So, for example, we would multiply the probability of team A scoring 0 goals by the probability of team B scoring 0 goals and that would give us the probability of the match ending in a 0-0 draw.

If my model and math are correct, I determined that the Phoenix Rising would be expected to win 34% of the time, lose 40% of the time, and draw 26% of the time. I am looking forward to meeting with Dr. Posta to go over my work and make sure I am on the right track and hopefully continue to build on my work thus far to build more precise models.

 


 

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