Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) predictor, is to the 2022 World Cup what Paul the Octopus was to the 2010 edition.
Kashef has been playing with historical data and performance to predict the results of each game, all the way to the final.
Here are its match predictions for the three games on Monday:
Who: England vs Iran, Group B
Where: Khalifa International Stadium
When: Monday, November 21 (4pm local time, 13:00 GMT)
Kashef is predicting a win for England this afternoon. Good start to Harry Kane’s team if things go according to Kashef’s plans.
Read the match preview here.
Who: Senegal v Netherlands, Group A
Where: Al Thumama Stadium
When: Monday, November 21 at 16:00 GMT
The European team to come out on top in the second match of the day as well, says Kashef. Senegal, do not forget, are the reigning African champions so they would want to prove Kashef wrong today.
Read the match preview here.
Who: USA v Wales, Group B
Where: Ahmed bin Ali Stadium
When: Monday, November 21, 10pm (19:00 GMT)
Will Gareth Bale be happy with Kashef this morning? Probably not. It has taken Wales a long time to get back into the World Cup. They would not want to start that with a loss.
Read the match preview here.
How does our AI match predictor work?
Al Jazeera collected more than 200 metrics measuring the performance history of the 32 teams competing at this year’s World Cup.
These include the number of wins, goals scored, FIFA rankings and more, from matches played over the past century, totalling over 100,000 records.
We ran these through Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, which produces state-of-the-art models – adopting Google Brain – that use Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS) to find the best prediction model. The data pipeline is built with GCP-BigQuery.
After every match, the model will be rerun to predict the outcome of the next game all the way through to the final.
Predicting match results is not easy. External factors like team morale or player fitness make a big difference to how the game goes.
Based on our simulations for the 2014 and 2018 World Cup tournaments, Kashef is about 71 percent accurate, with an area under the curve (AUC) of some 67 percent.
