Why Did Artificial Intelligence Fail in the FIFA World Cup 2018?

Here is what we learned from the AI’s failure to predict the results of the FIFA World Cup 2018 Russia.

The FIFA World Cup 2018 (Russia) ended today on Sunday July 15th, with France as the champion, followed by Croatia and Belgium. Just like the previous World Cup 2014, many researchers tried to predict the outcome of the tournaments in Russia in advance. This year, the FIFA World Cup 2018 was no exception, and researchers and scientists tried to exploit Artificial Intelligence (AI) and statistics to predict the outcomes of all 64 matches in FIFA World Cup.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made a lot of noise recently, and it is known as the future technology. Nowadays, AI is becoming a part of every large and medium businesses. But how reliable would it be? In this article, I talk about the performance of AI in predicting the results of the World Cup 2018 as a sample use-case. Either you are an expert in AI or not, I try to keep this article as simple and understandable as possible.

There are different approaches to predict the results of FIFA World Cup. One approach is to simulate every single match in a paired comparison in terms of team’s capabilities and the winning odds. Zeileis, Leitner, and Hornik (2018) used the same technique, and they predicted that Brazil would win the FIFA World Cup 2018 with a probability of 16.6%, and it is followed by Germany (15.8%) and Spain (12.5%) [1].

Swiss Bank UBS also predicted the same three teams as the top 3 teams but in a different order. They predicted Germany (24.0%) as the champion, followed by Brazil (19.80%) and Spain (16.1%). Their generated model was based on four factors: 1) the Elo rating; 2) the teams’ performances in the qualifications preceding the World Cup; 3) the teams’ success in previous World Cup tournaments, and 4) a home advantage. The model was calibrated by 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations to determine winning probabilities and the results of the last five tournaments [2].

On June 8, 2018, four researchers (A. Groll et al.) from Technical University of Dortmund (Germany), Ghent University (Belgium), and Technical University of Munich (Germany) published a research paper on arXiv…

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