Personal Development for Smart People Forums - View Single Post - Algorithm to automatically guess sport bets

raffish · 10-26-2007, 09:37 AM

The strange destiny of this post .. 2 weeks with 150 readers and no answers.. and then all at a sudden 2 EXTREMELY VALUABLE replies in one single day

I'm so happy with the smartness of people around this forum.

Back to the topic, I'm actually using C4.5 algorithm on individuals with 3 numeric attributes: 1 wage, X wage and 2 wage. The good thing about this is that I can bet on any football (soccer) match without actually knowing which teams are playing. It doesn't really matter. I only need the three numbers from the website in order to get a prediction on how to bet.

I also tried to add a 4th attribute (a label identifying the competition), but surprisingly enough this reduced the accuracy by 2-3%. I know that this can be due to the small number of matches recorded in my DB (actually around 5900, but increasing by around 500 every week), In fact 4-attribute accuracy is increasing over time faster than 3-attribute one, altough being lower at the beginning .

I renew my promise to publish a full report of my work on my website within this weekend.

I also kindly ask you why do you think that neural networks woudl be the most suitable kind of Machine Learning algorithm for the task?
I guessed that decision trees were what I was in search of : if "1" < 1.10 let's bet 1, else if "X">3.00 let's bet "2" and so on...

Isn't an if-then decisional tree the kind of final output we are aiming for ?

Pls remember that teh purpose of my

10-26-2007, 09:37 AM	#6 (permalink)
raffish Junior Member Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Appiano Gentile, Como, Italy Posts: 13	Choice: which Algorithm ? The strange destiny of this post .. 2 weeks with 150 readers and no answers.. and then all at a sudden 2 EXTREMELY VALUABLE replies in one single day I'm so happy with the smartness of people around this forum. Back to the topic, I'm actually using C4.5 algorithm on individuals with 3 numeric attributes: 1 wage, X wage and 2 wage. The good thing about this is that I can bet on any football (soccer) match without actually knowing which teams are playing. It doesn't really matter. I only need the three numbers from the website in order to get a prediction on how to bet. I also tried to add a 4th attribute (a label identifying the competition), but surprisingly enough this reduced the accuracy by 2-3%. I know that this can be due to the small number of matches recorded in my DB (actually around 5900, but increasing by around 500 every week), In fact 4-attribute accuracy is increasing over time faster than 3-attribute one, altough being lower at the beginning . I renew my promise to publish a full report of my work on my website within this weekend. I also kindly ask you why do you think that neural networks woudl be the most suitable kind of Machine Learning algorithm for the task? I guessed that decision trees were what I was in search of : if "1" < 1.10 let's bet 1, else if "X">3.00 let's bet "2" and so on... Isn't an if-then decisional tree the kind of final output we are aiming for ? Pls remember that teh purpose of my Last edited by raffish; 10-26-2007 at 11:19 AM.