Artificial Intelligence simulated the Qatar 2022 World Cup 100 thousand times: Brazil is the favorite.
Brazil , with a 15% probability of winning, would be the favorite team to win the Qatar 2022 World Cup , according to calculations by a team of scientists with the help of machine learning.
They also have “many chances of winning the title” the teams from Argentina (11.2%); Netherlands (9.7%); Germany (9.2%) and France (9.1%), followed by Spain with 7.5%, according to a study by the universities of Innsbruck (Austria); Ghent (Belgium); Luxembourg, and the technical universities of Dortmund and Munich (Germany).
How was this result determined?
The forecast combines several statistical models on the “playing strength” of the teams with information on the structure of the teams (such as the market value or the number of players in the Champions League), as well as socio-economic factors of the country of origin ( population or gross domestic product).
“This time, the World Cup is clouded by many ethical and sporting problems that we cannot ignore. However, for scientific reasons, we have decided to use our machine learning approach, which we have used successfully in previous tournaments, to make probabilistic forecasts,” said one of the authors, Achim Zeileis, quoted by the University of Innsbruck.
With the values predicted by the scientists’ model, the entire World Cup was simulated 100,000 times: match by match, following the tournament draw and all the FIFA rules , resulting in the probabilities with which the teams will pass. to the various rounds of the tournament and eventually win the championship.
The authors that their study provides “probabilities, not certainties. A 15% chance of winning also implies an 85% chance of not winning.”
Qatar 2022: more than interesting
The World Cup in Qatar is particularly interesting from a scientific point of view due to the unusual date, being played in winter, due to the high temperatures in summer.
In the winter months, all the major soccer leagues in Europe and South America have to interrupt their regular match schedule to accommodate the tournament, giving national teams less time to prepare and players less time to recover earlier and after the event.
Additionally, extreme weather conditions increase the risk of injury, Zeileis explained. Therefore, having a team with many players in international leagues – such as the Champions League, the Europa League or the Europa Conference League – “could turn out to be more disadvantage than advantage this year.”
“All these factors make it more difficult to predict how the tournament will turn out, since the variables that were very significant in previous World Cups could not work well or work differently,” said Andreas Groll, another of the signatories of the research published by Reports an Proceedings .
The scientists’ calculation is based on four sources of information: a statistical model for the “playing strength” of each team, based on all international matches in the last eight years, and another for the “playing strength” of the teams. , based on betting odds from 28 bookmakers
The third base is additional information about the teams, such as the market value, and their countries of origin -for example, the size of the population- and the fourth is an automatic learning model that combines the different sources and optimizes them step by step. step. EFE