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21 results for “home advantage”
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Myth or Maths
Is home advantage worth a goal?
Fans, pundits and managers all say home advantage is worth a goal. Over 18,000 Scottish league matches since 2000/01 say it is worth about a quarter of one.
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Research
Do referees favour the home side?
Away players are booked more often per foul than home players, in every one of 26 Scottish seasons. Much of that is because away sides do more defending.…
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Machine Learning #13
Tuning Elo honestly. Five dials and a moving target
…set, from how far one result moves a rating to how much home advantage is worth. Tuned on held-back seasons it draws level with Dixon-Coles on the test…
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Bayesian Thinking #6
Which ground is hardest to visit? Partial pooling
Every club's home record says something about its ground, and a lot about luck. Partial pooling lets the data decide how far to trust each club's own figure.…
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Myth or Maths
Is the split unfair?
…spring someone calls it unfair. Over 25 seasons, the home games even out, but the fixtures don't. The side 7th at the split takes 2.6 more points from the last…
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Machine Learning #8
Home, draw or away, with probabilities. A first real model, logistic regression
…numbers known before kick-off into a probability for home win, draw and away win, and how close can it get to the bookmakers? This part pulls the whole series…
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Machine Learning #12
Every team its own attack and defence. Dixon-Coles from scratch
…defence rating. There's one more for the whole league, home advantage. A match's expected goals are: In plain football λ (lambda) is how many goals the home…
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Model
Elo Ratings Simulator
Two ratings and home advantage give a win expectancy; see how far a win, draw or defeat moves each side.
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Machine Learning #14
Sure of itself, or just better informed? Calibration in depth
…forecaster that always gives the league's usual rates for home, draw and away is almost perfectly calibrated and has no resolution at all: honest, and useless.…
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Machine Learning #6
One good season or a good model? Cross-validation
…leave, teams go up and down, tactics shift, and even home advantage moves about over time. One season is one set of circumstances. The concept Cross-validation…
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Machine Learning #5
Stubborn or jumpy? Bias and variance
The football question Celtic lose at home to Rangers: their first defeat of the season. What should a prediction model make of it? One model shrugs: Celtic are…
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Machine Learning #10
Ask a hundred pundits. Random forests
…or jumpy. A random forest turns the jumpiness into an advantage, with two bits of deliberate randomness: A different set of matches for every tree. Each tree…
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Machine Learning #3
Brilliant in training, gone on matchday. Overfitting
…decent job on matches it's never seen. Recent xG and xGA, home advantage, opponent strength, injuries, rest days and recent form all carry real information…
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Research
Do football stats mislead? Five correlations put to the test
…was played behind closed doors: no crowds at all. The home edge in the top two divisions that season was 0.18 goals a game, but one season is too few matches…
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Research
How do you know if a football prediction model is any good?
…predictors range from the deliberately dumb (always back the home side; use the league's historical home, draw and away rates) through Elo, Poisson and…
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Statistics #3
How many goals will we score? The Poisson distribution
…together. That gives the chance of every scoreline. Say the home side is expected to score 2.0 and the visitors 0.8. The model makes the home side a clear…
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Machine Learning #9
Three questions and a prediction. Decision trees
…results, and turn the answers into a probability for home win, draw and away win? That's a decision tree. It's a different kind of model from logistic…
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Game Theory #6
Who designs the game? Three points for a win and the rules behind the football
…makes a goal at either end more likely. Here are the home side's chances of a win, draw and loss (made-up numbers): Home v away Home win, draw, loss Settle v…
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Game Theory #4
Who should change first? Substitutions, game trees and backward induction
…football question It's 70 minutes and you're 1–0 up at home. You're thinking of taking off a striker and sending on a defender. The other manager is thinking…
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Bayesian Thinking #5
Top at halfway. Who'll win the league? From beliefs to predictions
…Poisson distribution using the two teams' strengths and home advantage. Count: finish the table, note who's champion, and do it all again. Thousands of times.…
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Research
When is the title decided?
…standard way to model goals from attack, defence and home advantage.