Statistics and past data will be used to predict the outcomes of football matches, aiming to compete with the odds produced by the bookmakers. Remember, even if the bookmakers can be out performed, the bookmakers margin must be taken into consideration.\vspace{12pt}
Forecasted shall be probabilities for the outcomes of football matches from the English Premier league for the current season, 2015-2016. 83 matches will be used over a nine game week period from February 2 to the 3rd of April. An algorithm constructed shall be applied to the matches to produce the forecasts. \vspace{12pt}
Calculated shall be the Brier scores and Logarithmic scores of the gathered predictions to assess how accurate the forecasts are,…show more content… \vspace{12pt}
The following figure 4 represents the goal expectancies for each team for all the matches in the first gameweek. \vspace{12pt}
These are used for each match to produce percentage outcomes for the scoreline the match will end in. To do this the poisson distribution is applied to the data which calculates the percentage probabilities of all possible scorelines. In the worksheet study it only went up to 15 goals for either team as adding more possible scorelines will make no difference to the results even though they have a very small chance of occurring. For example the scoreline 16-16 would be calculated as a zero percent chance of happening. \vspace{12pt}
The poisson distribution in Microsoft Excel is expressed by:
\begin{itemize} \item x is the number of goals scored. \item mean is the goal…show more content… Strictly only taking into consideration the bookmakers margins, Bet365 would be the bookmaker to bet on to provide greater profit. \vspace{12pt}
Next the bookmakers odds need converted into percentages alike to the predictions created in order to calculate their Brier scores and for further analysis. To do this, needed is to calculate the margins the bookmakers have for each match. Additionally, to take the inverse of the odds for each outcome of the match and add them together as did prior, in the Arbitrage betting section. The following example will demonstrate how the percentage outcomes predicted by these three bookmakers were calculated. \vspace{12pt}
\begin{exmp}
For the match between Arsenal and Southampton that was introduced in the previous section, the odds from the three bookmakers which are being compared are represented in the following table 4:\vspace{12pt}
