Predicting football match results with logistic regression

Many efforts has been made in order to predict football matches result and selecting significant variables in football. Prediction is very useful in helping managers and clubs make the right decision to win leagues and tournaments. In this paper a logistic regression model is built to predict matches results of Barclays' Premier League season 2015/2016 for home win or away win and to determine what are the significant variable to win matches. Our work is different from others as we use only significant variables gathered from researches in the same field rather than making our own guess on what are the significant variables. We also used data gathered from video game FIFA, as Shin and Gasparyan [8] showed us that including data from the video game could improve prediction quality. The model was built using variations of training data from 2010/2011 season until 2015/2016. Logistic regression is a classification method which can be used to predict sports results and it can gives additional knowledge through regression coefficients. The variables used are "Home Offense", "Home Defense", "Away Offense", and "Away Defense". We conducted experiments by altering seasons of training data used. Prediction accuracy of built model is 69.5%. We found our work improved significantly compared to the one Snyder [9] did. We concluded that the significant variables are "Home Defense", and "Away Defense".