Expected goals from bookmaker odds

I recently read an interesting paper called The Betting Odds Rating System: Using soccer forecasts to forecast soccer by Wunderlich and Memmert. In their paper they develop av variant of the good old Elo rating system. Instead of using the actual outcomes of each match to calculate the ratings, they use the probabilities of the outcomes, which they get from bookmaker odds.

I was wondering if a similar approach could be used together with the goalmodel package I released a couple of months ago. The models available in the package are models I have written about extensively on this blog, and they all work as follows: You use the number of goals scored to get some ratings of the goal scoring and goal conceding rates of each team. You then use these ratings to forecast the expected number of goals in the upcoming games. These expected goals can then be used to calculate the probabilities of the outcome (Home win, draw, away win). A crucial step in these calculations is the assumption that the number of goals scored follow the Poisson distribution (or some related distribution, like the Negative Binomial).

But can we turn this process the other way around, and use bookmaker odds (or odds from other sources) to get expected goals and maybe also attack and defense ratings like we do in the goalmodel package? I think this is possible. I have written a function in R that takes outcome probabilities and searches for a pair of expected goals that matches the probabilities. You can find it on github. This function relies on using the Poisson distribution.

Next, I have expanded the functionality of the goalmodel package so that you can use expected goals for model fitting instead of just observed goals. This is possible by setting the model argument to “model = ‘gaussian'” or to “model = ‘ls'”. These two options are currently experimental, and are a bit unstable, so if you use them, make sure to check if the resulting parameter estimates make sense.

I used my implied package to convert bookmaker odds from the 2015-16 English Premier League into probabilities (using the power method), found the expected goals, and then fitted a goalmodel using the least squares method. Here are the resulting parameters, from both using the expected goals and observed goals:

I wanted to use this season for comaprison as this was the season Leicester won unexpectedly, and in the Odds-Elo paper (figure 6) it seemed like the ratings based on the odds were more stable than the ones based on the actual results, which increased drastically during the season. In the attack and defense ratings from the goalmodels we see that Leicester have average ratings (which is what ratings close to 0 are) in the model based on odds, and much higher ratings based on the actual results. So the goalmodel and Elo ratings seem to agree, basically.

I also recently discovered another paper titled Combining historical data and bookmakers’odds in modelling football scores, that tries something similar as I have done here. They seem to do the same extraction of the expected goals from the bookmaker odds as I do, but they don’t provide the details. Instead of using the expected goals to fit a model, they fit a model based on actual scores (similar to what the goalmodel package do), and then they take a weighted average of the model based expected goals and the expected goals from the bookmaker odds.

Introducing the goalmodel R package

I have written a lot about different models for forecasting football results, and provided a lot of R code along the way. Especially popular are my posts about the Dixon-Coles model, where people still post comments, four years since I first wrote them. Because of the interest in them, and the interest in some of the other models I have written about, I decided to tidy up my code and functions a bit, and make an R package out of it. The result is the goalmodel R package. The package let you fit the ordinary Poisson model, which was one of the first models I wrote about, the Dixon-Coles model, The Negative-Binomial model, and you can also use the adjustment I wrote about in my previous update.

The package contains a function to fit the different models, and you can even combine different aspects of the different models into the same model. You can for instance use the Dixon-Coles adjustment together with a negative binomial model. There is also a range of different methods for making prediction of different kinds, such as expected goals and over/under.

The package can be downloaded from github. It is still just the initial version, so there are probably some bugs and stuff to be sorted out, but go and try it out and let me know what you think!

A small adjustment to the Poisson model that improves predictions.

There are a lot extensions to the basic Poisson model for predicting football results, where perhaps the most popular is the Dixon-Coles model which I and other have written a lot about. One paper that seem to have received little attention is the 2001 paper Prediction and Retrospective Analysis of Soccer Matches in a League by Håvard Rue and Øyvind Salvesen (preprint available here). The model they describe in the paper extend the Dixon-Coles and Poisson model in several ways. The most interesting extension in how they allow the attack and defense parameters vary over time, by estimating a separate set of parameters for each match. This might at first seem like a task that should be impossible, but they manage to pull it of by using some Bayesian magic that let the estimated parameters borrow information across time. I have tried to implement something similar like this in Stan, but I haven’t gotten it to work quite right, so that will have to wait for another time. There’s many other interesting extensions in the paper as well, and here I am going to focus on one of of them which is an adjustment for teams to over and underestimate opponents when they differ in strengths.

The adjustment is added to the formulas for calculating the log-expected goals. So if team A plays team B at home, the log-expected goals $$\lambda_A$$ and $$\lambda_B$$

$$\lambda_A = \alpha + \beta + attack_{A} – defense_{B} – \gamma \Delta_{AB}$$

$$\lambda_B = \alpha + attack_{B} – defense_{A} + \gamma \Delta_{AB}$$

In these formulas are $$\alpha$$ the intercept, $$\beta$$ the home team advantage and $$\Delta_{AB}$$ is a factor that determines the amount a team under- or overestimation the strength of the opponent. This factor is given as

$$\Delta_{AB} = (attack_{A} + defense_{A} – attack_{B} – defense_{B}) / 2$$

The parameter $$\gamma$$ determines how large this effect is. A positive $$\gamma$$ implies that a strong team will underestimate a weak opponent, and thereby score fewer goals than we would otherwise expect, and vice versa for the opponent.

In the paper they do not estimate the $$\gamma$$ parameter directly together with the other parameters, but instead set it to a constant, with a value they determine by backtesting to maximize predictive ability.

When I implemented this model in R and estimated it using Maximum Likelihood I noticed that adding the adjustment did not improve the model fit. I suspect that this might be because the model is nearly unidentifiable. I even tried to add a Normal prior on $$\gamma$$ and get a Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) estimate, but then the MAP estimate were completely determined by the expected value of the prior. Because of these problems I decided to use a different strategy: I estimated the model without the adjustment, but add the adjustment when making predictions.

I am not going to post any R code on how to do this, but if you have estimated a Poisson or Dixon-Coles model, it should not be that difficult to add the adjustment when you calculate the predictions. If you are going to use some of the code I have posted on this blog before, you should notice the important detail that in the formulation above I have followed the paper and changed the signs of the defense parameters.

In the paper Rue and Salvesen write that $$\gamma = 0.1$$ seemed to be an overall good value when they analyze English Premier League data. To see if my approach of adding the adjustment only when doing predictions is reasonable I did a leave-one-out cross validation on some seasons of English Premier League and German Bundesliga. I fitted the model to all the games in a season, except one, and then add the adjustment when predicting the result of the left out match. I did this for several values of $$\gamma$$ to see which values works best.

Here is a plot of the Ranked Probability Score (RPS), which is a measure of prediction accuracy, against different values of $$\gamma$$ for the 2011-12 Premier League season:

As you see I even tried some negative values of $$\gamma$$, just in case. At least in this season the result agrees with the estimate $$\gamma = 0.1$$ that Rue and Salvesen reported. In some of the later seasons that I checked the optimal $$\gamma$$ varies somewhat. In some seasons it is almost 0, but then again in some others it is around 0.1. So at least for Premier league, using $$\gamma = 0.1$$ seems reasonable.

Things are a bit different in Bundesliga. Here is the same kind of plot for the 2011-12 season:

As you see the optimal value here is around 0.25. In the other seasons I checked the optimal value were somewhere between 0.15 and 0.3. So the effect of over- and underestimating the opponent seem to be greater in the Bundesliga than in Premier League.

A simple re-implementation of the Dixon-Coles model

A couple of years ago I implemented the Dixon-Coles model for predicting football results here on this blog. That series of of blog posts is my most popular since I keep getting comments on it, some four years later.

One of the most common requests is advice on how to expand the model to include additional predictors. Unfortunately with the implementation I posted this was not so straightforward. It relied on some design matrices with dummy-coded variables, which is a standard way of doing things in regression modeling. The DC model isn’t a standard regression modeling problem, so using matrices complicated things. I posted some updates and variant across several posts, which in the end made the code a bit hard to follow and to modify.

Anyway, I’ve had a simpler implementation lying around for a while, and since there’s been far between updates on this blog lately I thought I’d post it.

First load some data from the engsoccerdata package. I’m going to use the 2011-12 season of the English Premier League, so the results can be compared with what I got from the first implementation.

library(dplyr)
library(engsoccerdata)

england %>%
filter(Season == 2011,
tier==1) %>%
mutate(home = as.character(home),
visitor = as.character(visitor))-> england_2011


Next we should create a list of initial parameter values. This will be used as a starting point for estimating the parameters. The list contains vectors of four groups of parameters, the attack and defense parameters of all teams, the home field advantage and the Dixon-Coles adjustment (rho). The attack and defense vector are named so that it is easy to look up the relevant parameter later on.

Notice also that a sum-to-zero constraint has to be added to the defense parameters, so in reality we are estimating one defense parameter less than the number of teams. Check this post for some more explanation of this.

# Make a vector of all team names.
all_teams <- sort(unique(c(england_2011$home, england_2011$visitor)), decreasing = FALSE)
n_teams <- length(all_teams)

# list of parameters with initial values.
parameter_list <- list(attack = rep(0.2, n_teams),
defense = rep(-0.01, n_teams-1),
home = 0.1,
rho= 0.00)

names(parameter_list$attack) <- all_teams names(parameter_list$defense) <- all_teams[-1] # the first parameter is computed from the rest.


Next we need a function that calculates the negative log-likelihood function, to be used with R’s built in optimizer.

One trick I use here is to relist the parameters. The optimizer want all parameter values as a single vector. When you have a lot of parameters that group together and is used in different parts of the model, this can quickly create some complicated indexing and stuff. By supplying the original parameter list, plus having named vectors, these problems essentially disappear.

Also notice how the expected goals are now simply computed by looking up the relevant parameters in the parameter list and adding them together. No need for matrix multiplications.

The Dixon-Coles adjustment function tau is the same as in the original implementation.

dc_negloglik <- function(params, goals_home, goals_visitor,
team_home, team_visitor, param_skeleton){

# relist, to make things easier.
plist <- relist(params, param_skeleton)

# There is a sum-to-zero constraint on defense parameters.
# The defense parameter for the first team is computed from the rest.
plist$defense <- c(sum(plist$defense)*-1, plist$defense) names(plist$defense)[1] <- names(plist$attack[1]) # add name to first element. # Home team expected goals lambda_home <- exp(plist$attack[team_home] + plist$defense[team_visitor] + plist$home)

# Away team expected goals
lambda_visitor <- exp(plist$attack[team_visitor] + plist$defense[team_home])

dc_adj <- tau(goals_home, goals_visitor, lambda_home, lambda_visitor, rho = plist$rho) # Trick to avoid warnings. if (any(dc_adj <= 0)){ return(Inf) } # The log-likelihood log_lik_home <- dpois(goals_home, lambda = lambda_home, log=TRUE) log_lik_visitor <- dpois(goals_visitor, lambda = lambda_visitor, log=TRUE) log_lik <- sum((log_lik_home + log_lik_visitor + log(dc_adj))) return(log_lik*-1) }  To actually estimate the parameters we feed the function, data and initial values to optim, and check the results.  optim_res <- optim(par = unlist(parameter_list), fn=dc_negloglik, goals_home = england_2011$hgoal,
goals_visitor = england_2011$vgoal, team_home = england_2011$home, team_visitor = england_2011$visitor, param_skeleton=parameter_list, method = 'BFGS') # relist, and calculate the remaining parameter. parameter_est <- relist(optim_res$par, parameter_list)
parameter_est$defense <- c( sum(parameter_est$defense) * -1, parameter_est$defense) names(parameter_est$defense)[1] <- names(parameter_est\$attack[1])


I get the same home field advantage (0.27) and rho (-0.13) as in the original implementation. The other parameters differ, however. This is because of the sum-to-zero constraints are coded in a different way. This should not matter and both ways should give the same predictions.

I have not yet said anything about how to expand the model to include other predictors, but hopefully this implementation should make it easier. You can just add some new arguments to the dc_negloglik function that takes the variables in question as input, and add new parameter vectors to the parameter list as needed. Then the calculations of the expected goals should be modified to include the new parameters and predictors.

Which model is the best?

I had a discussion on Twitter a couple of weeks ago about which model is the best for predicting football results. I have suspected that the Dixon & Coles model (DC), which is a modification of the Poisson model, tend to overfit. Hence it should not generalize well and give poorer predictions. I have written about one other alternative to the Poisson model, namely the Conway-Maxwell Poisson model (COMP). This is a model for count data that can be both over-, equi- and underdispersed. It is basically a Poisson model but without the assumption that the variance equals the mean. I have previously done some simple analyses comparing the Poisson, DC and COMP models, and concluded then that the COMP model was superior. The analysis was however a bit to simple, so I have now done a more proper evaluation of the models.

A proper way to evaluatie the models is to do a backtest. For each day there is a game played, the three models are fitted to the available historical data (but not data from the future, that would be cheating) and then used to predict the match outcomes for that day. I did this for two leagues, the English Premier League and German Bundesliga. The models were fitted to data from both the top league and the second tier divisions, since this improves the models, but only the results of the top division was predicted and used in the evaluation. I used a separate home field advantage for the two divisions and the rho parameter in the DC model and the dispersion parameter in the COMP model was estimated using the top division only.

To measure the model’s predictive ability I used the Ranked Probability Score (RPS). This is the proper measure to evaluate predictions for the match outcome in the form of probabilities for home win, draw and away win. The range of the RPS goes from 0 (best possible predictions) to 1 (worst possible prediction). Since the three models actually model the number of goals, I also looked at the probability they gave for the actual score.

For all three models I used the Dixon & Coles method to weight the historical data that is used in training the models. This requires tuning. For both the English and German leagues I backtested the models on different values of the weighting parameter $$\xi$$ on the seasons from 2005-06 to 2009-10, with historical data available from 1995. I then used the optimal $$\xi$$ for backtesting the seasons 2010-11 up to December 2016. This last validation period covers 1980 Bundesliga matches and 2426 Premier League matches.

Here are the RPS for the three models plottet against $$\xi$$. Lower RPS is better and lower $$\xi$$ weights more recent data higher.

The graphs show a couple of things. First, all three models have best predictive ability at the same value of $$\xi$$, and that they compare similarly also for non-optimal values of $$\xi$$. This makes things a bit easier since we don’t have to worry that a different value of $$\xi$$ will alter our evaluations about which model is the best.

Second, there is quite some difference between the models for the German and English data. In the English data the COMP model is clearly best, while the DC is the worst. In the German league, the DC is clearly better, and the COMP and Poisson models are pretty much equally good.

So I used the optimal values of $$\xi$$ (0.0021 and 0.0015 for Premier League and Bundesliga, respectively) to validate the models in the data from 2010 and onwards.

Here is a table of the mean RPS for the three models:

We see that for the both English Premier League and German Bundesliga the DC model offers best predictions. The COMP model comes second in Premier League, but has worst performance in the Bundesliga. It is interesting that the DC model performed worst in the tuning period for the Premier League, now was the best one. For the Bundesliga the models compared similarly as in the tuning period.

I also looked at how often the DC and COMP models had lower RPS than the Poisson model. The results are in this table:

The COMP model outperformed the Poisson model in more than 60% of the matches in both leagues, while the DC model did so only about 40% of the time.

When looking at the goal scoring probabilities. Here is a table of the sum of the minus log probabilities for the actual scoreline. Here a lower number also indicates better predictions.

Inn both the Premier League and Bundesliga the Poisson model was best, followed by COMP, with the DC model last.

We can also take a look at the parameter values for the extra parameters the DC and COMP models has. Remember that the DC models is becomes the Poisson model when rho = 0, while the COMP model is the same as the Poisson model when upsilon = 1, and is underdispersed when upsilon is greater than 1.

The parameter estimates fluctuates a bit. It is intersting to see that the rho parameter in the DC model tend to be below 1, which gives the opposite direction of what Dixon and Coles found in their 1997 paper. In the Premier League, the parmater makes a big jump to above 0 at the end of the 2013-14 season. The parameter appears to be a bit more consistent in the Bundesliga, but also there we see a short period where the parameter is around 0.

The dispseriosn parameter upsilon also isn’t all that consistent. It is generally closer to 1 in the Bundesliga than in the Premier League. I think this is consistent with why this model was better in the Premier League than in the Bundesliga.

All inn all I think it is hard to conclude which of the three models is the best. The COMP and DC models both adjusts the Poisson model in their own specific ways, and this may explain why the different ways of measuring their predictive abilities are so inconsistent. The DC model seem to be better in the German Bundesliga than in the English Premier League. I don’t think any of the two models are generally better than the ordinary Poisson model, but it could be worthwhile to look more into when the two models are better, and perhaps they could be combined?

The comparison graph part 2

In the last post I wrote about how a graph could be used to explore an important aspect of a data set of football matches, namely whom has played against whom. In this post I will present a more interesting graph. Here is how a graph of 4500 international matches, including friendlies, world cups, and continental cups, from 2010 to 2015:

There are 214 teams in this data set, each represented by a circle, and if two teams has played against each other, there is a line drawn between the two circles. It becomes clear when we see this graph that the graph is complicated, with a lot of lines between the circles, and it is hard to make a drawing that shows the structure really well.

There are a few things we can see clearly, though. The first is that the graph is highly connected. All teams are at least indirectly comparable with all other teams. There are no unconnected subgraphs. One measure of how connected the graph is, is the average number of edges the nodes have. In this graph this number is 23.2, which means that each team has on average played against 23 other teams.

On interesting thing we also notice is the “arm” on the right side of the plot, with a handful of teams that is more or less separated from the rest of the teams. These are teams from the Pacific nations, such as Fiji, Samoa and Cook Islands and so on.

In a data set like this we can find some interesting types of indirect comparisons. One example I found in the above graph was Norway and Japan, who has not played against each other in the five year period the data spans, but they have both played against two other teams that link them together: Zambia and Greece.

I haven’t found a decent measure of the overall connectedness between two nodes, that incorporates all indirect links of all degrees, but that could be an interesting thing to look at.

Another thing we can do with a graph like this is a cluster analysis. A cluster analysis gives us a broader look at the connectedness in the graph by finding groups of nodes that are more connected to each other that to those in the other groups. In other words we are trying to find groups of countries that play against each other a lot.

A simple clustering of the graph gives the following clusters, with some of the country names shown. The clustering algorithm identified 5 clusters that rather perfectly corresponds to the continents. This is perhaps not so surprising since the continental competitions (including the World Cup qualifications) make up a large portion of the data.

Tuning the Elo ratings: Initial ratings and inter-league matches

In the last post I discussed how to tune the Elo ratings to make the ratings have the best predictive power by finding the optimal update factor (the K-factor) and adjustment for home field advantage. One thing I only mentioned, but did not go into detail about, was that the teams initial ratings will influence this tuning. In this post I will show how we can find good initial ratings that also will mitigate some other problems associated with Elo ratings.

As far as I can tell, setting the initial ratings does not seem to be much discussed. The Elo system updates the ratings by looking at the difference between the actual results and the results predicted by the rating difference between the two opposing teams. To get this to work in the earliest games in the data, you need to supply some initial ratings.

It is possible to set the initial ratings by hand, using your knowledge about the strengths of the different players and teams. This strategy is however difficult to use in practice, since you may not have that knowledge, which in turn would give incorrect ratings. This task would also become more difficult the more teams and players are in your data. An automatic way to get the initial ratings is of course preferable.

The only automatic way to set the initial ratings I have seen is to set all ratings to be equal. This is what they do at FiveThirtyEight. This simple strategy is obviously not optimal. It is a bit far fetched to assume that all teams are equally good at the beginning of your data, even if you could argue that you don’t really know any better. If you have a lot of data going back a long time, then only the earliest period of your ratings will be unrealistic. After a while the ratings will become more realistic and better reflect the true strengths of the teams.

The unrealistic ratings for the earliest data may also cause a problem if you use this to find the optimal K-factor. In Elo ratings the K-factor is a parameter that determines how much new games will influence the ratings. A larger K-factor makes the ratings change a lot after a new game, while a low K-factor will make the ratings change only a little after each new game. If you are trying to make a rating system with good prediction ability and use the earliest games with the unrealistic ratings to tune the K-factor, then it will probably be overestimated. This is because a large K-factor will make the ratings change a lot at the beginning, making the ratings better quicker. A large K-factor will be good in the earliest part of your data, but after a while it may be unrealistically big.

One more challenge with Elo ratings is if you include multiple leagues or competitions in your rating system. Since the Elo ratings are based on the exchange of points, groups of teams that play each other often, such as the teams in the same league, will have ratings that are reasonable calibrated only between each other. This is not the case when you have teams from different leagues play each other. The rating difference between two teams from two leagues will not be as well-calibrated as those within a league.

A nice visualization of this is to plot which teams in your data have played each other. In the plot below each team is represented by a circle, and each line between the circles indicates that the two teams have against played each other. The data is from Premier League and the Championship from the year 2010; two half-seasons for each division. I haven’t added team names to the graph, but the orange circles are the teams that played in the Premier League in both seasons, while the blue circles are teams that played in the Championship or got promoted or relegated.

We clearly see that the two division cluster together with a lot of comparisons available between the teams. Six teams, those that got promoted and relegated between the two divisions, are clearly shown to fall in between the two large clusters. All comparisons to be made between teams in the two divisions has to rely on the information that is available via these six teams. Including all these teams in a Elo rating, starting with all ratings equal, will surely be completely wrong and will take some time to be realistic. All point exchange between the divisions will have to happen via the promoted and relegated teams.

I have previously investigated this in the context of regression models, where I demonstrated how including data from the Championship improves the prediction of Premier League matches. Se this and this.

So how can we find the initial ratings that will give realistic ratings that also calibrate the ratings between two or more leagues? By using a small amount of data, say one year worth of data, less that you would use to tune the K-factor and home field advantage, you can use an optimization algorithm to find the ratings that best fits the observed outcomes. In doing this you have to use the formula that converts the ratings to expected outcomes, but you do not use the update formula, so this approach can be seen as a static version of the Elo ratings.

Doing the direct optimization is however not completely straightforward. Elo ratings is a zero-sum system. No points are added or removed from the system, only exchanged. This constraint is similar to the sum-to-zero constraint that is sometimes used in regression modeling and Analysis-of-Variance. To overcome this, we can simply set the rating of one of the teams to the negative sum of the ratings of all the other teams.

A further refinement is to include home field advantage into the optimization. In cases where the teams have unequal number of home games, or some games where no teams play at home, this will create more accurate ratings. If not the ratings for those teams with an excess of home games will become unrealistically large.

Doing this procedure, using data from the Premier League and the Championship from 2010 which I used to make the graph above, I get the following ratings (with the average rating being 1500):

The procedure also estimated the home field advantage to be 84.3 points.

The data I used for the initial ratings is the first year of the data I used to tune the K-factor in the previous post. How does using these initial ratings influence the this tuning, compared with using the same initial rating for all teams? As expected, the optimal K-factor is smaller. The plot below shows that K=14 is the optimal K, compared with K=18.5 that I found last time. It is also interesting to see that the ratings with initialization are more accurate for the whole range of K’s I tested, than those without.

Tuning the Elo ratings: The K-factor and home field advantage

The Elo rating system is quite simple, and therefore easy implement. In football, FIFA uses is in its womens rankings and the well respected website fivethirtyeight.com also uses Elo ratings to make predictions for NBA and NFL games. Another cool Elo rating site is clubelo.com.

Three year ago I posted some R code for calculating Elo ratings. Its simplicity also makes it easy to modify and extend to include more realistic aspects of the games and competitions that you want to make ratings for, for example home field advantage. I suggest reading the detailed description of the clubelo ratings to get a feel of how the system can be modified to get improved ratings. I have also discussed some ways to extend the Elo ratings here on this blog as well.

If you implement your own variant of the Elo ratings it is necessary to tune the underlying parameters to make the ratings as accurate as possible. For example, a too small K-factor will give ratings that update too slow. The ratings will not adapt well to more recent developments. Vice versa, a too large K-factor will put too much weight on the most recent results. The same goes for the extra points added to the home team rating to account for the home field advantage. If this is poorly tuned, you will get poor predictions.

In order to tune the rating system, we need a way to measure how accurate the ratings are. Luckily the formulation of the Elo system itself can be used for this. The Elo system updates the ratings by looking at the difference between the actual results and the results predicted by the rating difference between the two opposing teams. This difference can be used to tune the parameters of the system. The smaller this difference is, the more accurate are the predictions, so we want to tune the parameters so that this difference is as small as possible.

To formulate this more formally, we use the following criterion to assess the model accuracy:

$$\sum_i[ (exp_{hi} – obs_{hi})^2 + (exp_{ai} – obs_{ai})^2 ]$$

where $$exp_{hi}$$ and $$exp_{ai}$$ are the expected results of match i for the home team and the away team, respectively. These expectations are a number between 0 and 1, and is calculated based on the ratings of the two teams. $$obs_{hi}$$ and $$obs_{ai}$$ are the actual result of match i, encoded as 0 for loss, 0.5 for draw and 1 for a win. This criterion is called the squared error, but we will use the mean squared error.

With this criterion in hand, we can try to find the best K-factor. Using data from the English premier league as an example I applied the ratings on the match results from the January 1st 2010 to the end of the 2014-15 season, a total of 2048 matches. I tried it with different values of the K-factor between 7 and 25, in 0.1 increments. Then plotting the average squared error against the K-factor we see that 18.5 is the best K-factor.

The K-factor I have found here is, however, probably a bit too large. In this experiment I initialized the ratings for all teams to 1500. This includes the teams that was promoted from the Championship. A more realistic rating system would initialize these teams with a lower rating, perhaps be given the ratings from the relegated teams.

We can of course us this strategy to also find the best adjustment for the home field advantage. The simple way to add the home field advantage is to add some additional points to the ratings for the home team. Here I have used the same number of points in all matches across all season, but different strategies are possible. To find the optimal home field advantage I applied the Elo ratings with K=18.5, using different home field advantages.

From this plot we see that an additional 68.3 points is the optimal amount to add to the rating for the home team.

One might wonder if finding the best K-factor and home field advantage independent of each other is the best way to do it. When I tried to find the best K-factor with the home field advantage set to 68, I found that the best K was 19.5. This is a bit higher than when the home field advantage was 0. I tried to find the optimal pair of K and home field advantage by looking over a grid of possible values. Plotting the accuracy of the ratings against both K and the home field advantage in a contour we get the following:

The best K and home field advantage pair can be read from the plot, both of which is a bit higher than the first values I found.

Doing the grid search can take a bit of time, especially if you don’t narrow down the search space by doing some initial tests beforehand. I haven’t really tried it out, but alternating between finding the best K-factor and home field advantage and using the optimal value from the previous round is probably going to be a reasonable strategy here.

My predictions for the 2016-17 Premier League

This year I am participating in Simon Gleave‘s Premier League prediction competition. It is an interesting initiative, as both statistical models and and more informal approaches are compared.

Last time I participated in something like this was midway trough the last Premier League season for statsbomb.com’s compilation. This time, however, the predictions are made before the first match has been played. To be honest, I think it is futile to try to model and predict an unplayed season since any model based only on previous results will necessarily reproduce what has already happened. This approach will work OK for predicting the result of the next couple of matches midway trough a season, but making predictions for the start of a season is really hard since the teams have brought inn some new players and gotten rid of other and perhaps also changed managers and so on. And not to forget that we also try predict results 9 months into the future.

When May comes and my predictions are completely wrong, I am not going to be embarrassed.

Last time I wanted to use the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson model, but I did not get it to work when I included data from several seasons plus data from the Championship. I still did not get it to work properly, but this time I tried a different approach to estimate the parameters. I ended up using a two-step approach, where I first estimate the attack and defense parameters with the independent Poisson model, and then, keeping those parameters fixed, I estimated the dispersion parameter by itself.

To fit the model I used Premier League data from the 2010-11 season to the 2015-16 season. I also included data from the 2015-16 season of the Championship (including the playoff) to be able to get some information on the promoted teams. I used the Dixon-Coles weighting scheme with $$\xi = 0.0019$$. I used a separate parameter for home field advantage for Premier League and the Championship. I also used separate dispersion parameters for the two divisions.

I estimated the dispersion parameter for the Premier League to be 1.103, about the same as I previously estimated in some individual Premier League seasons, indicating some underdispersion in the goals. Interestingly, the dispersion parameter for the Championship was only 1.015.

Anyway, here are my projected league table with expected (or average) point totals. This is completely based on the model, I have not done any adjustments to it.

Team Points
Manchester City 73.70
Arsenal 69.73
Leicester City 64.12
Manchester United 63.95
Chelsea 63.84
Tottenham 62.53
Southampton 60.51
Liverpool 60.37
Everton 51.48
West Ham 51.12
Middlesbrough 46.30
Swansea 44.59
Burnley 44.20
Stoke City 42.99
Hull 42.49
Crystal Palace 41.33
Watford 41.23
Sunderland 39.83
West Bromwich Albion 39.21
Bournemouth 36.37

My predictions for the rest of the Premier League season

A couple of weeks ago Constantinos Chappas asked on twitter for predictions for the results of the remaining season of English Premier League:

I had been thinking about posting some predictions about the Premier League around new years, since this season is really exciting and it would be a great opportunity to see how well my models would cope with everything that is currently going on. I have never posted any predictions before, so this will surely be an interesting experience. And I thought Chappas’ initiative was really interesting, so that surely gave me a nice reason to come trough.

Today Chappas posted the combined results from all 15 participants so I thought I could share some of the details behind my contribution.

I originally wanted to use the Conway-Maxwell model I have written about recently, but I had some problems with the estimation procedure, so I instead used a classic Poisson model. I used data on Premier League and Championship results going back to the 2011-12 season. By including data from the Champoionship I hope to get better predictions, like I have demonstrated before. Since I used data from a long time back I used the Dixon-Coles weighting scheme, which make more recent games have a greater impact on the predictions. The weighting parameter $$\xi$$ was set to 0.0019, which gives a bit more weight on more recent games than the 0.0018 I found to be most optimal earlier.

I fitted the model and calculated the probabilities for the remaining games of the season. From these probabilities I simulated the rest of the season ten thousand times. From these simulations we can get the probabilities and expectations for the end of season results.

So how do I predict the league table will look like at the end of the season?

Team Points
Manchester City 75.7
Arsenal 75.2
Tottenham 65.6
Leicester City 64.8
Manchester United 64.3
Liverpool 58.2
West Ham 56.1
Chelsea 54.7
Everton 53.7
Crystal Palace 53.7
Stoke City 52.9
Watford 51.9
Southampton 50.6
West Bromwich Albion 45.8
Norwich City 43.7
Bournemouth 42.9
Swansea City 40.9
Newcastle 34.5
Sunderland 31.5
Aston Villa 23.1

Although I predict 0.2 points more for Manchester City than Arsenal, the probabilities for both of them to win is 47.0%. I also give Tottenham a 2.3% chance, Leicester 2.1% and Manchester United a 1.5%. At last, Liverpool have a 0.1% chance. The other teams have a chance less than 0.04%.

I will come back with an update with my entire table with probabilities for all positions for all teams.