CAN STATISTICAL MODELS BEAT BENCHMARK PREDICTIONS BASED ON RANKINGS IN TENNIS?

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to beat a benchmark prediction of 64.58 percent based on player rankings on the ATP tour in tennis. That means that the player with the best rank in a tennis match is deemed as the winner. Three statistical model are used, logistic regression, random forest and XGBoost. The data are over a period between the years 2000-2010 and has over 60 000 observations with 49 variables each. After the data was prepared, new variables were created and the difference between the two players in hand taken all three statistical models did outperform the benchmark prediction. All three variables had an accuracy around 66 percent with the logistic regression performing the best with an accuracy of 66.45 percent. The most important variable overall for the models is the total win rate on different surfaces, the total win rate and rank.