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Predicting the World Cup Winner with Data Visualization

by Travis Korte
by
A visualization of each participating country's World Cup chances.

The FIFA World Cup begins on June 12, but analysts are already confident that Brazil, the host country, has a major edge against its opponents. New York-based software engineer Andrew Yuan created a visualization to accompany his analysis, which shows that Brazil is about three times as likely to come out on top as the next most likely team, Spain.

The intuitive visualization shows each team’s hypothetical chances to make it through each stage of the bracket and win the final match. The underlying analysis pulls data from over 40,000 past matches and over 45,000 ranking positions, as well as geographical data on how well teams performed in hundreds of locations. Not surprisingly, the amount by which a team outranks its opponent is a good predictor of victory, so this is the key variable upon which forecasts for individual match-ups are based.

Take a look.

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