Combining Machine Learning and Human Experts to Predict Match Outcomes in Football: A Baseline Model

No. 17: IAAI-21, EAAI-21, AAAI-21 Special Programs and Special Track

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 35

IAAI Technical Track on AI Best Practices, Challenge Problems, Training AI Users

In this paper, we present a new application-focused benchmark dataset and results from a set of baseline Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning models for prediction of match outcomes for games of football (soccer). By doing so we give a baseline for the prediction accuracy that can be achieved exploiting both statistical match data and contextual articles from human sports journalists. Our dataset is focuses on a representative time-period over 6 seasons of the English Premier League, and includes newspaper match previews from The Guardian. The models presented in this paper achieve an accuracy of 63.18% showing a 6.9% boost on the traditional statistical methods.

10.1609/aaai.v35i17.17815