Forecasting Winner of Cricket Game

The current standard for international cricket games is to use the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (DLS) method, created by British statisticians in the mid-1990s, to determine the winner when a game has to be called early. Dr. Jehangir Amjad, a researcher at MIT Operation Research Center, is viewing this as a forecasting problem. “We aren’t just interested in predicting what the final score would be; we actually project out the entire trajectory for every ball, we project out what might happen on average,” he says.

In collaboration with Professor Devavrat Shah, a MIT/LIDS principal investigator, and Vishal Misra, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, Jehangir used the robust synthetic control method to propose a solution to the forecasting problem, which has also led to a target revision algorithm like the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method. Having back-tested their cricket results on many games, they are confident in the approach. They are currently comparing it to DLS, he says, and planning “what statistical argument we can make so that we can hopefully convince people that we have a viable alternative.”

The technology is detailed in a paper entitled with “Robust Synthetic Control”, which was published in the Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2018.

Dr. Jehangir Amjad

Professor Devavrat Shah

For more details, you can visit: A game changer takes on cricket’s statistical problem