Introducing Regularisation to Generalised Joint Regression Modelling and its Application to Football and Sports

When modelling the bivariate outcome of football matches and other sports, many different approaches regarding dependency have been investigated. We propose the use of copula regression via the powerful GJRM (Generalised Joint Regression Models) framework in R by Giampiero Marra and Rosalba Radice and present its use for modelling match results. Motivated by the application to football and FIFA World Cups in particular, we introduce two types of useful penalties. The first tackles a very specific issue occurring in sport tournaments and leagues (or other competitive situations), while the second is a Lasso-approximation yielding general sparsity.

The talk was given by Hendrik van der Wurp from the Technical University of Dortmund.