ICC T20 Cricket World Cup 2020 Winner Prediction Using Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

Predicting future sounds like magic, whether it be detecting, in advance, the intent of a potential customer to purchase company's products or figuring out where the price of a stock is heading towards. If we can reliably predict the future of something, then we own a massive advantage. Machine learning has served to amplify this magic and uncover the mystery. It has also served in the fields of sports. Billions of people around the world are big fans of Cricket and wait for the results eagerly. In this paper, we discuss the 7 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sup> edition of T20 World Cup 2020 which will be held in Australia. We have compared popular machine learning techniques for the prediction of the T20 cricket world cup winner. Among the developed models, Random Forest proved to be the best machine learning algorithm using a custom accuracy metric. It obtained a custom accuracy of 80.86%. In this analysis, Australia emerged as the winner of the T20 world cup 2020. For this purpose, the ESPN Cricinfo dataset has been used.