Dr Will Knottenbelt's work on computerised algorithms for professional tennis match prediction has recently been featured on Bloomberg News and Radio.
Dr Knottenbelt's broad area of research interests are in the application of mathematical modelling techniques to real life systems. One of his interests is in stochastic modelling of sport and it is his work in this area related to Tennis match prediction that drew the attention of Bloomberg.
Will says that Tennis is an “attractive” sport to create an algorithm for because there are only two players in a singles match and statistics are freely available. He co-wrote a tennis algorithm that he says would have made a 3.8 percent return on bets on 2,173 ATP matches in 2011.
Speculators and investment funds are increasingly vying for profits from tennis by using computer models to win money, Such quantitative analysts, or so-called quants, are focusing on Tennis in the same way their counterparts are employed by hedge funds to predict moves for stocks, bonds and other assets.
Betfair, a London-based company that enables bettors to wager against each other online, matched almost 50 million pounds ($82 million) of bets on the 2012 final in which Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal.
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Royston Ingram
Department of Computing
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