In times past, when we wanted to know which team would win the World Cup, we had to turn to seers with crystal balls, use divination via tea leaves, or hope for Paul the Octopus to tell us what would happen. But modern data science can provide a better alternative. As part of a team of statisticians, I helped train a machine learning algorithm to predict the most likely course of the tournament. Probabilistic forecasts and loaded dice The algorithm we built proceeds in two steps. In the first...

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