Using Bioinformatics algorithms to predict the European Football Championship

Researchers from the Computational Molecular Evolution (CME) group at HITS have simulated the knock-out phase of the European Football Championship using an algorithm which is normally used for research in the field of bioinformatics. According to their calculations, France and England will most likely face each other in the final of the 2021 European Football Championship, with England having a slightly higher chance of becoming European champions. The prediction was made by Alexandros Stamatakis, research group leader at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and Professor for High Performance Computing in the life sciences at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and CME group member Ben Bettisworth.

“Algorithms for calculating tournament winners are similar to algorithms for reconstructing evolutionary relationships between different species in the field of phylogenetics,” explains Stamatakis. “Therefore, tournament outcomes can be calculated by adapting methods for evolutionary tree inference.” Phylogenetics deals with investigating the evolutionary history of currently living organisms. Together with his PhD student Ben Bettisworth at HITS, Alexandros Stamatakis developed the new software tool “Phylourny” to forecast probable winners of knockout tournaments and provided winning probabilities for the teams participating at the 2021 European Football Championship.

“We have adapted an algorithm from bioinformatics for this,” explains Bettisworth. “The key feature of our approach is that we no longer need to simulate the tournament many times to approximate win probabilities but can compute these probabilities exactly and efficiently – given pairwise win probabilities for the individual matches.”

In addition to better and faster predictions, this work could also enable the development of new methods for calculating improved pairwise win probabilities for individual matches. The researchers have made their software available as open-source code.

More Information:

Phylourny: Predicting the Knock-out-phase of Tournaments via Phylogenetic Methods by example of the UEFA EURO 2020. https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/phylourny.pdf

Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.24.449715v1