A group of European statisticians claim to have built a machine learning algorithm capable of predicting this year’s winner of the FIFA World Cup.
The model works by crunching a variety of data on national teams and players before running 100,000 simulations to find the most likely winner.
By this method, the team’s lead author – University of Innsbruck statistician Dr Achim Zeileis – explained in a blog post, the most probable victor of this year’s competition is Spain, with England the next most likely to triumph.
It’s not the first time that the group, comprising researchers from Germany’s TU Dortmund and TU Munich universities, Norway’s Molde University College, and Austria’s University of Innsbruck, has attempted to use machine learning to predict the World Cup winner.
In 2018, the team correctly predicted the US as the winners of the 2019 Women’s World Cup, though they were less lucky with their choices of Spain and Argentina as victors of the 2023 women’s and 2022 men’s competition, respectively.
