On Elo based prediction models for the FIFA Worldcup 2018

We propose an approach for the analysis and prediction of a football championship. It is based on Poisson regression models that include the Elo points of the teams as covariates and incorporates differences of team-specific effects. These models for the prediction of the FIFA World Cup 2018 are fitted on all football games on neutral ground of the participating teams since 2010. Based on the model estimates for single matches Monte-Carlo simulations are used to estimate probabilities for reaching the different stages in the FIFA World Cup 2018 for all teams. We propose two score functions for ordinal random variables that serve together with the rank probability score for the validation of our models with the results of the FIFA World Cups 2010 and 2014. All models favor Germany as the new FIFA World Champion. All possible courses of the tournament and their probabilities are visualized using a single Sankey diagram.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure

Capacity of the Range of Random Walks on Free Products of Graphs

In this article we prove existence of the asymptotic capacity of the range of random walks on free products of graphs. In particular, we will show that the asymptotic capacity of the range is almost surely constant and strictly positive.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure

Nested Zero Inflated Generalized Poisson Regression for FIFA World Cup 2022

This article is devoted to the forecast of the FIFA World Cup 2022 via nested zero-inflated generalized Poisson regression. Our regression model incorporates the Elo points of the participating teams, the location of the matches and the of team-specific skills in attack and defense as covariates. The proposed model allows predictions in terms of probabilities in order to quantify the chances for each team to reach a certain stage of the tournament. We use Monte Carlo simulations for estimating the outcome of each single match of the tournament, from which we are able to simulate the whole tournament itself. The model is fitted on all football games of the participating teams since 2016 weighted by date and importance. Validation with previous tournaments and comparison with other Poisson models are given.Comment: 22 pages, 14 tables, 4 figures. Update October 30: including now all historic matches until 30.10.2022 for latest forecast. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2106.05174, arXiv:1806.01930, arXiv:1905.0362

Range of Random Walks on Free Products

In this article we consider transient nearest neighbour random walks on free products of graphs. We prove that the asymptotic range of these random walks exists and is strictly positive. In particular, we show that the range varies real-analytically in terms of probability measures of constant support. Moreover, we prove a central limit theorem associated with the range of the random walk.Comment: 38 page

Rate of Escape of Random Walks on Regular Languages and Free Products by Amalgamation of Finite Groups

We consider random walks on the set of all words over a finite alphabet such that in each step only the last two letters of the current word may be modified and only one letter may be adjoined or deleted. We assume that the transition probabilities depend only on the last two letters of the current word. Furthermore, we consider also the special case of random walks on free products by amalgamation of finite groups which arise in a natural way from random walks on the single factors. The aim of this paper is to compute several equivalent formulas for the rate of escape with respect to natural length functions for these random walks using different techniques.Comment: 16 page