Predicting the Outcome of a Tennis Tournament: Based on Both Data and Judgments

Abstract

This paper is about predicting the outcome of tennis matches of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) using both data and judgments. There are many factors that influence that outcome. An important question is which factors have significant influence on the outcome. We have identified numerous factors and systematically prioritized them subjectively and objectively, so as to improve the accuracy of the prediction. We then used them to predict the win-lose outcome of the 2015 US OPEN tennis matches (63 men and 31 women’s games) before they took place. The tennis match prediction in sports literature thus far reported an accuracy rate of 70%.The accuracy of our proposed model which combines data and judgment reaches 85.1%

Keywords

Prediction / tennis / data analysis / judgment

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