International Journal of Nonlinear Analysis and Applications
A Bayesian approach for major European football league match prediction
Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Malaysia
2 Faculty of Applied Sciences and Technology, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Malaysia
3 Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
4 School of Sport and Leisure, Viana do Castelo Polytechnic Institute, Portugal
Abstract
This paper presents a Bayesian Approach for Major European Football League match prediction. In this study, four variants of Bayesian approaches are investigated to observe the impact of different structural learning algorithms within the family of Bayesian Network which are Naive Bayes (NB), Tree Augmented Naive Bayes (TAN) and two General Bayesian Networks (GBN); K2 algorithm with BDeu scoring function (GBN-K2) and Hill Climbing algorithm with MDL scoring function (GBNHC). The predictive performance of all Bayesian approaches is evaluated and compared based on football match results from five major European Football League consisting of three complete seasons of 1,140 matches. The results showed that GBN-HC gained 92.01% of accuracy while GBN-K2 and TAN produced comparable results with 91.86% and 91.94% accuracy, respectively. The lowest result was produced by NB, with only 72.78% accuracy. The results suggest that TAN requires further exploration in football prediction with its ability to cater the minimal dependency among attributes in a small-sized dataset.
Keywords
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Volume 12, Special Issue
December 2021Pages 971-980
- Receive Date: 01 June 2021
- Revise Date: 10 September 2021
- Accept Date: 24 September 2021