TRAIN Scholar Steven Gonzalez's Blog

    Hi all,   The USL Championship game took place this past weekend and our very own Phoenix Rising defeated the Charleston Battery to become the 2023 USL champions! More excitingly, our model accurately predicted a win for the Phoenix Rising. The model also had a 1-1 draw as the most probable outcome for the match, happening 13% of the time. At the end of regulation time, the game was in fact a 1-1 draw. Being a championship game, the game went on to overtime and eventually penalty kicks where the Rising came out on top. Accurately predicting the outcome of the championship game was a great way to wrap up the season. With the semester coming to an end soon, we are starting to wrap things up with our work for this semester before moving on to hopefully refining the model next semester.        

  Hi all, the playoffs are well underway and have been full of surprises this year. There have been a few big upsets this year including both the number one and number two seeds in the Eastern Conference being knocked out in the first round of playoffs. These upsets did not bode well for our predictions as our models favored both of these teams to win their matches. Our model only accurately predicted the outcome for 3 out of the 8 matches in the first round. Ouch! Thankfully our model did a lot in the second round of the playoffs.   Our very own Phoenix Rising have pulled off a couple of big upsets in the playoffs, knocking out both the two and three seeds in the Western Conferences. They are going up against the number one-seeded Sacramento Republic this weekend. With another upset, they will move on to the Championship. Good luck Rising!   I was assigned the Eastern Conference, so I created a model for the Easter Conference final between the Charleston Battery and Louisvil