Title: Player skill estimation for soccer match prediction

Authors: Juan Pablo Maldonado López; Vojtěch Jindra

Addresses: Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague, Thákurova 7, 160-00 Praha 6, Czech Republic ' Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague, Thákurova 7, 160-00 Praha 6, Czech Republic

Abstract: In this paper we propose two algorithms for assessing skill of soccer players. We introduce an adaptation of the Elo rating algorithm, which is widely used in chess, to handle teams. A different approach is proposed to assess player skill as a function of the proportion of matches won. Since it is hard to measure skill directly, to estimate the performance of our approach we propose as a proxy the number of correctly predicted match outcomes of a classifier that takes as input our algorithms' output. Numerical experiments suggest that our approach is competitive with book-keeper's estimates, even though we rely only on historical game outcome data.

Keywords: Elo ranking; skill-based ranking; soccer ranking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAPR.2019.104292

International Journal of Applied Pattern Recognition, 2019 Vol.6 No.1, pp.52 - 57

Received: 17 Dec 2018
Accepted: 03 Jun 2019
Published online: 02 Jan 2020 *

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