Exploiting oddsmaker bias to improve the prediction of NFL outcomes
This work addresses the challenge of improving sports outcome predictions for profit-seeking groups, but it is incremental as it builds on known biases in oddsmaking.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting NFL game outcomes by exploiting oddsmaker biases, finding that methods leveraging these biases performed best under tested conditions, potentially increasing profit for stakeholders.
Accurately predicting the outcome of sporting events has been a goal for many groups who seek to maximize profit. What makes this challenging is that the outcome of an event can be influenced by many factors that dynamically change across time. Oddsmakers attempt to estimate these factors by using both algorithmic and subjective methods to set the spread. However, it is well-known that both human and algorithmic decision-making can be biased, so this paper explores if oddsmaker biases can be used in an exploitative manner, in order to improve the prediction of NFL game outcomes. Real-world gambling data was used to train and test different predictive models under varying assumptions. The results show that methods that leverage oddsmaker biases in an exploitative manner perform best under the conditions tested in this paper. These findings suggest that leveraging human and algorithmic decision biases in an exploitative manner may be useful for predicting the outcomes of competitive events, and could lead to increased profit for those who have financial interest in the outcomes.