World Cup 2022 and All the Predictive Fun

The 2022 World Cup live from Qatar has stolen the world’s attention, and many people have been watching and rooting for their favorite team to win. However, in a highly anticipated football match, there’s always wins and losses. But what if you could predict which country would win the 2022 World Cup? And now that you know, does that make you more or less excited?

Various analyses and predictions are often made to determine which team will win the World Cup this year. Considerable methods from multiple fields also released their predictions. The predictions coming from academia are no exception, such as one prediction made by a mathematician from Oxford using a mathematical model to predict the path to the 2022 World Cup.

An Oxford Mathematical Institute post-doctoral student, Joshua Bull, did mathematical modeling by simulating group phases up to a million times and taking the most common results. As quoted from the official Twitter @UniofOxford, the algorithm was then simulated again for the knockout phase up to 100,000 times. He created this mathematical model by analyzing each team’s Elo ranking from international match data since 2018. Is there another way to make predictions?

Researchers from the Alan Turing Institute also created a sophisticated AI model that is claimed to predict the results of the 2022 World Cup. They collected data compiled with data from GitHub, data that shows the results and statistics of every international match since 1872. Apart from using data on match results, researchers also Incorporate official FIFA rankings into the AI model to make predictions more accurate.

The algorithm then uses Bayesian statistics to predict the most likely score for each game. Researchers then experimented with testing AI to predict the World Cup winner in previous years, such as 2014, 2008, 2002 and so on. They then move on to predict the 2022 World Cup winner. After tracing the winning list of the 2022 World Cup matches more than 100,000 times, AI provides a series of predictions, giving out which country has the best chance of winning.

We can conclude that before making predictions using mathematical models or AI models, we must have appropriate and structured data to carry out the calculation. They have international match data since 2018 or statistics of every international match since 1872 which are the reference as the basis data. The results of both show that Brazil is in the top ranking. However, keep in mind that this result includes raw data analysis where this model only considers previous results, without additional factors such as weather which might change the final result.

Moreover, data plays a huge role in making predictions for the future. Good maintenance is needed for the data owned by storing it in a trusted place to organise it. Not only for predictions for the 2022 world cup, but business owners can also use data to see business potential in the future. For example, when a business wants to expand to another region, product extensions, or prepare for unexpected events in the future.

We can say this structured data collection is called data science, which is how we use data for a purpose, along with data mining used to go through structured data to find “odd data” or unusual data. This unique data is referred to as a pattern that aims to make decisions. In the case of the 2022 world cup, this strange pattern was taken by researchers to be tested many times to produce the expected results.

Existing data can be used to see various prospects of a company in the future. Various predictions can also be made. Seeing the importance of these two sciences for the future, BIGIT can help by providing appropriate training on how to process data to achieve the desired predictions. Find out more on our LinkedIn page