Applying Probability in Football: Analyzing David Sumpter’s Insights.
At a glance:
Check out how I use statistics to make sense of football! In this report, I dive into David Sumpter's "Soccermatics" to show how something called the Poisson distribution helps us predict how often goals might happen in a game.
What I learned:
This project taught me how to use the Poisson distribution to build a straightforward model for predicting how many goals might be scored in a Premier League game. It was a practical lesson in using probability theory I had learned in school to solve real-world problems in football, showing me just how useful these tools can be for making predictions about game outcomes.
Challenges:
One of the main challenges I faced was figuring out how to efficiently collect and clean large datasets, similar to David Sumpter's approach in creating his histograms.
Next Steps:
My familiarity with Python and R is still growing, and mastering these tools for data collection and analysis has sparked my interest in dedicating my next project to developing these skills further.