Comparing State-of-the-Art Neural Network Ensemble Methods in Soccer Predictions

Abstract

For many reasons, including sports being one of the main forms of entertainment in the world, online gambling is growing. And in growing markets, opportunities to explore it arise. In this paper, neural network ensemble approaches, such as bagging, random subspace sampling, negative correlation learning and the simple averaging of predictions, are compared. For each one of these methods, several combinations of input parameters are evaluated. We used only the expected goals metric as predictors since it is able to have good predictive power while keeping the computational demands low. These models are compared in the soccer (also known as association football) betting context where we have access to metrics, such as rentability, to analyze the results in multiple perspectives. The results show that the optimal solution is goal-dependent, with the ensemble methods being able to increase the accuracy up to +3 % over the best single model. The biggest improvement over the single model was obtained by averaging dropout networks.

This work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project UIDB/50014/2020.