Don’t blame the referee! If you're
looking for someone to blame over Nigeria’s Super Eagles loss to France last Monday,
you can start with Google.
A horse or is it a Camel inaccurately predicted
that Nigeria would up set Argentina in their World Cup Group match up. Obviously,
that didn't pan out.
It's unlikely that anyone went back to
the equine seer ahead of the knockout round against FRANCE on Monday, but there
was at least one forecaster that got it right.
That would be Google.
The Internet giant is touting how the Google
Cloud Platform has been crunching large data sets and statistics (many of which
flood Twitter with every kick, goal and penalty in each match) to predict the
outcome of each game.
Starting with numbers generated by live
sports data firm Opta, Google engineers have employed an amalgam of Google
Cloud Data flow to ingest data, Big Query to build derived features, iPython and
Pandas to conduct modeling, and finally the Compute Engine to crunch the data.
This evolved into a logistic regression
approach in predicting the winners versus a poisson regression, according to
Mountain View.
And so far, it seems to be working as
the Google Cloud Platform has boasted a perfect record in the nail-biting Round
of 16.
However, Google engineers also
acknowledged there weren't any "any major upsets" this last round
either.
For anyone who wants to take a chance on Google Cloud
Platform's method, here's a glance at the predictions for the quarterfinals
this weekend:
- Brazil vs. Colombia: WINNER Brazil (71%)
- France vs. Germany: WINNER Germany (69%)
- The Netherlands vs. Costa Rica: WINNER Netherlands (68%)
- Argentina vs. Belgium: WINNER Argentina (81%)
