PLFantasy

As promised, it's time to take a step back from forecasting and projecting and look at how the model has performed since I rolled it out in Gameweek 8. There are three ways to look at this: Look at each player's weekly forecast score versus their actual weekly score Look at each player's aggregated forecast score versus their actual aggregated score Look at each player's average forecast score (per 90 minutes) versus their average actual score Each measure has it's advantages and disadvantages but I will throw the first option out as any model is simply not going to be accurate enough on a weekly basis enjoy great success. Of course, we can use its outputs to forecast the probability of different players' chance to succeed but even if it was perfect we'd still see massive fluctuations. So that leaves options two and three which each have some advantages: option two is the truest comparator of how the model performed over the period while option thre...

One of the issues of the new forecast model is deciding which kind of shots to use to forecast player success: all of them, only those in the box or only those on target. Those on target have the best correlation to goals scored, however, there is a slight concern with limiting ourselves to that data alone. Consider the below example: Robin van Persie: Appearances 10, Total Shots 55, 10 Shots On Target, 3 Goals If we only look at his shots on target we see that he is averaging just one a game, with 30% of them hitting the back of the net. The issue is that he has historically hit the target at a much better rate than 10/55 (18%), having a success rate more in the 44% range. We therefore need to adjust for the fact that we believe 24 of his next 55 shots (44%) will hit the target and thus his expected goals will be higher. We have some issue about how to generate this historic rate, especially with regards to what data to use, but for now I'm happy to look at such data for pl...

Let's try this again. The first draft of this post was erased when Blogger assumed that Ctrl-Z meant "select all, delete, save" rather than the more standard "undo". Anyway, after a few choice words were screamed at any - and all - inanimate objects in sight, the end result is probably positive for you, the reader, as the second time round is often more concise with less - though still considerable amounts of - needless waffle. We started this series with some tentative steps into forecasting individual player data by looking at goals , and the presumption that we surely do better than "he looks in form" or has an "easy" opponent this week. This post on predicting assists is going to follow a similar path, though we will find a couple of different issues along the way that will need to be expanded on in future posts. Before we get too deep, we need to throw out a quick caveat and acknowledge the proverbial elephant: the definition an...