July 8 2018: As the FIFA World Cup fever rages on, people are willing to do whatever it takes to know their favourite team’s next win. From animal soothsayers to heartfelt prayers, football fans explore all avenues.
Bing Predicts – an AI powered prediction engine from Microsoft envisages winning chances of teams, making the game more interesting. Bing Predicts uses predictive analysis and machine learning to provide deeper insights for predicting team wins.
Bing accurately predicted the winners of 6 out of 8 knockout stage games so far, in the ongoing 2018 World Cup, including the victory of France over Argentina. Its prediction of Belgium’s win over England in the group stages was against odds but Bing’s pick persevered.
Today, Bing Predicts can envisage possible outcomes for sports events across the world be it football, cricket, tennis or individual sports like track and field events. Predicting the outcome of live competitions is a breakthrough in predictive analysis and machine learning. With many variables, live events like football matches and reality TV shows are rich in data but challenging to predict. Creating a model for accurately forecasting these dynamic events was an interesting experiment for our researchers. Here’s how the model was created and improved over the years. 
To know more about Bing Predicts, please read the full story here.
Sports predictions are different from forecasts of events based on popularity and voting. Indeed, sports are fun because of their unpredictability. The actions of a handful of players can affect the outcome of games and tournaments. The uncertainty makes forecasting sporting events more challenging and fun. Today, our engine provides users predictions for who will win, the percentage of our prediction confidence, and the reasons for each victory across the most popular sporting events.
You can view the experience here. Bing users can follow the  model’s prediction closely to see whether the engine can surpass its own record.