Impact of the variation of horse racing odds on the outcome of horse races at the Champ de Mars

Abstract

Horse Racing is the favourite sports of Mauritians. This can be demonstrated by the presence of huge crowds at the Champ de Mars on racing days. Many people wait for the last moment to bet as they feel that the variation of odds has an influence on the winner of a race at the Champ de Mars. This is the motivation for this research. Thus, in this work, we have used artificial neural networks to predict the winner of a race based on the variation of the odds. The odds were collected at eight different intervals. The training has been done on 232 races and the testing on 27 races. An overall percentage of 7.4% was obtained for the prediction of winners. This shows that the variation in horse racing odds does not have any impact on the outcome of horse races at the Champs de Mars. To our knowledge, this is the first study which studies the relationship between the variation in odds and the rank of horses.