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Paper details
Number 3 - September 2021
Volume 31 - 2021
A combinatorial approach in predicting the outcome of tennis matches
Ana Šarčević, Mihaela Vranić, Damir Pintar
Abstract
Tennis, as one of the most popular individual sports in the world, holds an important role in the betting world. There
are two main categories of bets: pre-match betting, which is conducted before the match starts, and live betting, which
allows placing bets during the sporting event. Betting systems rely on setting sports odds, something historically done
by domain experts. Setting odds for live betting represents a challenge due to the need to follow events in real-time and
react accordingly. In tennis, hierarchical models often stand out as a popular choice when trying to predict the outcome
of the match. These models commonly leverage a recursive approach that aims to predict the winner or the final score
starting at any point in the match. However, recursive expressions inherently contain computational complexity which
hinders the efficiency of methods relying on them. This paper proposes a more resource-effective alternative in the form
of a combinatorial approach based on a binomial distribution. The resulting accuracy of the combinatorial approach is
identical to that of the recursive approach while being vastly more efficient when considering the execution time, making it
a superior choice for live betting in this domain.
Keywords
binomial distribution, final score prediction, independent and identical distribution, predictive model.