JORS paper<\/a>). The data included the travel distances between all the teams in each division. I also maintained the fixtures that were actually played over the Christmas\/New Year period so that I could compare the fixtures I generated against those that were actually played. Needless to say, it took a long time to collect all this data.<\/p>\nAs I had gone to all the time and trouble of collecting the data I want to maximise its usage, so I began to look for other uses that I could put it to, and prediction seemed an obvious challenge.<\/p>\n
With this in mind, for most of last season I collected additional data that I think might<\/i> be important in predicting football matches. For example, I have been updating all the scores as each fixture was played. I have also been keeping a record of the odds that bookmakers were offering. Just collecting this data was a large data collection exercise in itself and I certainly did not get the odds on every fixture, but I have enough to be going on with.<\/p>\n
I’m not totally sure what I am going to do with this data yet but I know if I don’t collect some of it as and when it is available, it becomes almost impossible (or at least a lot more difficult) to collect.<\/p>\n
I have started programming some support functions. For example, given a date and a set of results I can generate the relevant league table for that point in the season.<\/p>\n
My ultimate goal is to develop a prediction model and test out how good it is on the 2008-2009 season and, if I find a good model I will try and predict the fixtures for the 2009-2010 season before the matches are actually played.<\/p>\n
The new season starts quite soon (kick off is 8th August 2009, but there is one match scheduled on the 7th August 2009).<\/p>\n
If I am going to have ever chance of testing the prediction model over the coming season, I need to get programming!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have recently become interested in trying to predict the results of football matches. The interest grew from wondering what else I could use the data for, that I had collected for generating football fixtures (see JORS paper). The data included the travel distances between all the teams in each division. I also maintained the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,8,15,7],"tags":[157],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-football","category-prediction","category-sports-scheduling","tag-prediction_project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1285,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/1285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}