Logic mining in football matches

Abstract

Sports results forecast has became increasingly popular among the fans nowadays. It made predicting the outcome of a sport’s match, a new and interesting challenge. This paper presented a logic mining technique to model the results (Win Draw / Lose) of the football matches played in English Premier League, Spanish La Liga and France Ligue 1. In this research, a method namely <em>k</em> satisfiability based reverse analysis method (<em>k</em>SATRA) hybridized with Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) was brought forward to obtain the logical relationship among the clubs in these leagues. The logical rule obtained from the football matches was used to categorize the results of future matches. ACO is a population-based and nature-inspired algorithm to decipher several combinatorial optimization problems. <em>k</em>SATRA made use of the advantages of Hopfield Neural Network and k Satisfiability representation. The data set used in this study included the data of 6 clubs from each league, which composed of all league matches from year 2014 to 2018. The effectiveness of <em>k</em>SATRA with ACO in obtaining logical rule in football matches was tested based on root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and CPU time. Results acquired from the computer simulation showed the robustness of <em>k</em>SATRA in exhibiting the performance of the clubs.