Title: Bayesian Computation and Inference using Stan with application in Football
Abstract: In this talk, we show how Bayesian Statistics can be applied to football modelling. In this respect, we attempt to model the number of goals scored and conceded by two football teams using two Bayesian models. The first model we use is a simple Bayesian interpretation of the away and home team for each match. The second model we use is an implementation of hierarchical models. We use hierarchical model as we want to express the correlation between the number of goals for the home team and the number of goals for the away team. We use data from the English Premier League for the season 2017/18 which provide us with the final result of each match of the season and help us to describe the characteristics of each team. We then choose different variables and see how well they fit our model. Finally, we make predictions from the simple Bayesian and the hierarchical model and compare the two models.