2018 FIFA World Cup: Brazil to lift their sixth title in Russia, say reports

Mumbai: The worlds biggest sporting spectacle i.e 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia is two days away as fans gear up world wide to support their favourite team.

While fans are desperate to see their team lift the title in Russia, Goldman Sachs Group reckons Brazil will win its sixth World Cup, basing its forecast on data mining, machine learning and econometrics.

According to reports in Bloomberg, the investment bank used 200,000 statistical models, sifted data on individual players and recent team performance and ran 1 million simulations of the tournament. As a result, it predicts that Brazil will lift the trophy on July 15.

Four years back (2014) the selecao were humiliated 7-1Germany leaving the nation in tears and dent their bid to lift the world cup on their home ground.

Here’s the Goldman explanation in more detail:

“We feed data on team characteristics, individual players and recent team performance into four different types of machine learning models to analyze the number of goals scored in each match. The models then learn the relationship between these characteristics and goals scored, using the scores of competitive World Cup and European Cup matches since 2005. By cycling through alternative combinations of variables, we get a sense of which characteristics matter for success and which stay on the bench. We then use the model to predict the number of goals scored in each possible encounter of the tournament and use the unrounded score to determine the winner.” - Goldman Sachs, June 2018.

It remains to be seen if the module prediction turns out to be true as World Cup has been game of unpredictability.