Comparing machine learning and ensemble learning in the field of football

Abstract

Football has been one of the most popular and loved sports since its birth on November 6th, 1869. The main reason for this is because it is highly unpredictable in nature. Predicting football matches results seems like the perfect problem for machine learning models. But there are various caveats such as picking the right features from an enormous number of available features.  There have been many models which have been applied to various football-related datasets. This paper aims to compare Support Vector Machines a machine learning model and XGBoost an Ensemble learning model and how Ensemble Learning can greatly improve the accuracy of the predictions.