Attention Economy


Saturday, July 14, 2018

Statistical Modeling and Forecasting – A Reality Check

World Cup 2018 predictions by Goldman Sachs turned out to be spectacularly wrong:
Leonid Bershidsky notes:
“Goldman Sachs’ statistical model for the World Cup sounded impressive: The investment bank mined data about the teams and individual players, used artificial intelligence to predict the factors that might affect game scores and simulated 1 million possible evolutions of the tournament. The model was updated as the games unfolded, and it was wrong again and again. It certainly didn't predict the final opposing France and Croatia on Sunday….
The moral of the story is probably that buzz-generating technologies such as big data and AI don’t necessarily make statistical forecasting more accurate”.