On the importance of the probabilistic model in identifying the most decisive games in a tournament

Francisco Corona, Juan de Dios Tena and Wiper Michael Peter
Additional contact information
Wiper Michael Peter: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Statistics, Getafe, Madrid, Spain

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 2017, vol. 13, issue 1, 11-23

Abstract: Identifying the decisive matches in international football tournaments is of great relevance for a variety of decision makers such as organizers, team coaches and/or media managers. This paper addresses this issue by analyzing the role of the statistical approach used to estimate the outcome of the game on the identification of decisive matches on international tournaments for national football teams. We extend the measure of decisiveness proposed by Geenens (2014) in order to allow us to predict or evaluate the decisive matches before, during and after a particular game on the tournament. Using information from the 2014 FIFA World Cup, our results suggest that Poisson and kernel regressions significantly outperform the forecasts of ordered probit models. Moreover, we find that although the identification of the most decisive matches is independent of the model considered, the identification of other key matches is model dependent. We also apply this methodology to identify the favorite teams and to predict the most decisive matches in 2015 Copa America before the start of the competition. Furthermore, we compare our forecast approach with respect to the original measure during the knockout stage.

Keywords: entropy; game importance; Kernel regression; ordered probit model; Poisson model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/jqas-2016-0013 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Working Paper: On the importance of the probabilistic model in identifying the most decisive game in a tournament (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:13:y:2017:i:1:p:11-23:n:1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/jqas/html

DOI: 10.1515/jqas-2016-0013

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports is currently edited by Mark Glickman

More articles in Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().