FIFA World Cup Predictor
The World Cup is the most prominent sporting event in the world, with over 1 billion people tuning in. The bare-bones nature of soccer allows for it to be easily understood and adopted, allows for it to be played by almost anyone (regardless of socioeconomic background), and it’s exciting atmosphere allows for it to be enjoyed by all. The World Cup has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon and the stakes to win are high; the winning nation receives a great deal of international fame and prestige. Recently, the World Cup has been growing in international recognition and viewership, and even though the World Cup has garnered such a huge viewer-base, the state of analytics on the World Cup (and soccer, in general) matches is archaic, relative to other sports such as Basketball and American Football. Soccer and World Cup analytics are on the rise, however, within the scope of this project, we plan on making a prediction model to contribute to these analytics even further.
The best prediction results were produced using a random forest ensemble model and resulted in a 61.534% accuracy of predicting one of three results: win, loss, or draw on the test data. The features used were publicly available FIFA statistics and country-specific data (e.g. uniqueness of play, value (euros), elevation, etc.) For more information, refer to the “models” section in the link below.