Who could win FIFA World Cup in Qatar? Data scientists analyse

Five-time champion Brazil has the highest chance of winning the ongoing FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar, according to data scientists.

DataLab, Serasa Experian’s innovative laboratory has used machine learning techniques to predict the winner of the football World Cup and also who will reach the semi-finals.

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According to DataLab, Brazil has a 53.4% chance of reaching the last-four stage in Qatar and a 20.9% chance of going on to win the trophy for a record sixth time on December 18.

The next best team which has a high probability of winning the trophy is Argentina (14.3%). The next best is France (11.4%) followed by Spain (9%) and Germany (3.4%).

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As per the company, “A machine learning model was created based on data from the last three football World Cup cycles. Using similar algorithms used by streaming platforms to recommend shows to users, DataLab set up a machine learning system that predicts the probability of the result of each match between two countries.”

Those who are likely to qualify for the knockouts (Round of 16), are Brazil (97.48%), Argentina (96.1%), France (93.4%), Spain (89.6%) and Germany (69.6%).

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Talking about the methodology, the company said that “A data set containing all the results of the last three World Cup cycles were used: countries involved in the match, dates, type of competition (friendly, qualifiers, regional, and world cups, etc.), and the result.”

“The information was processed with recommendation systems and deep learning (matrix factoring and autoencoders) using a similarity metric that indicates how much two teams are similar based on the history of match results. We incorporated this data representation and used a boosting model to train a machine learning system to be able to predict the probability of the outcome of each match considering the current scenario, that is, the period before the championship,” it added.

Also read: Neymar out of next two group matches

Brazil opened its FIFA World Cup 2022 campaign with a 2-0 win over Serbia while it lost Neymar for the next two matches due to an injury. Argentina was stunned 2-1 by Saudi Arabia in its opener after taking the lead with Lionel Messi’s penalty.