[alexroan]

Great base for future development of the idea.

Some things to take into account though:

- Friendly games are sometimes about fitness rather than winning at all costs

- Weather greatly effects results. For example, in heavy rain and high wind, the likelihood of the game yielding more than 2.5 goals reduces massively.

- How does the algorithm take into account substitutions?

- If a team in the group has already won 2 games, they may have already won. In that case they may rest many players or try new tactics

- Not all leagues (and levels of those leagues) are taken into account

Very much looking forward to seeing where this goes!

[lum]

Thanks a lot for the comments!

- about friendly games: agreed, in the future we'd like to downweight them (as well as downweight older games over newer ones)

- about substitutions: at training time, we look at the number of minutes each player has spent on the field. At test time, we assume there will be no substitution. Could certainly be improved :-)

- about teams that are already qualified: true, our model does not encode all these contextual factors, and arguably they are very important for certain games. If the lineup changes (e.g. star players resting) it does impact the prediction.