Microsoft Bing Comes Up With World Cup Football Predictions

On the eve of World Cup Football event, Microsoft Bing today posted their predictions for this biggest sporting event in the world. Microsoft recently posted predictions on which contestants were most likely to get voted off or win The Voice, Dancing With the Stars, and American Idol, and they are taking the experiment a step further applying it to the World Cup.   When a user search for “World Cup”, “Predictions”, or any matches, Microsoft will display the chances of each respective team to win as seen in the image above.

How Did We Come Up with the Predictions?

The process of predicting outcomes of sporting events is unlike voting show predictions, as popularity and some sentiment signals do not play similar roles in determining who wins a contest.  Rather, the actions and performances of a handful of individuals solely determine who wins, loses, or ties.  For the tournament, our models evaluate the strength of each team through a variety of factors such as previous win/loss/tie record in qualification matches and other international competitions and margin of victory in these contests, adjusted for location since home field advantage is a known bias.  Further adjustments are made related to other factors which give one team advantages over another, such as home field (for Brazil) or proximity (South American teams), playing surface (hybrid grass), game-time weather conditions, and other such factors.  In addition, data obtained from prediction markets allows us to tune the win/lose/tie probabilities due to the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ phenomenon captured by the people wagering on the outcomes.

You can read more about the model on the Next Blog here.