A comparative study on neural network based soccer result prediction

Abstract

This study mainly remarks the efficiency of black-box modeling capacity of neural networks in the case of forecasting soccer match results, and opens up several debates on the nature of prediction and selection of input parameters. The selection of input parameters is a serious problem in soccer match prediction systems based on neural networks or statistical methods. Several input vector suggestions are implemented in literature which is mostly based on direct data from weekly charts. Here in this paper, two different input vector parameters have been tested via learning vector quantization networks in order to emphasize the importance of input parameter selection. The input vector parameters introduced in this study are plain and also meaningful when compared to other studies. The results of different approaches presented in this study are compared to each other, and also compared with the results of other neural network approaches and statistical methods in order to give an idea about the successful prediction performance. The paper is concluded with discussions about the nature of soccer match forecasting concept that may draw the interests of researchers willing to work in this area.