With only one day left for the 2018 Fifa World Cup to kick off, the world is abuzz with news and analysis of the prestigious world tournament which will be taking place in Moscow.
Though in the last season, Goldman Sachs' predictions proved incorrect, the firm has this time around deployed machine learning to run 200,000 models, mining data on team and individual player attributes to predict that Brazil will win the World Cup this year.
In a similar vein, London-based market research firm OpenSignal has decided to capitalize on all the excitement surrounding one of the world's largest sporting event to produce its own set of predictions on which country will emerge champion, but this time in terms of the highest mobile metric score. Just like how countries play against each other through various rounds of elimination, OpenSignal deployed a similar approach to rate and rank each country and determine the final winner among the 32 contestants who took up the challenge. And the results? Denmark emerged champion after outdoing Belgium in the finals.
According to OpenSignal, overall download speeds were used for elimination at the group stage, followed by 3G download speeds in the Round of 16, 4G upload speeds in the quarter-finals, 4G download speeds in the semi-finals and back to overall download speeds in finals.
Commenting on the success of Denmark, Opensignal's Kevin Fitchard, wrote in blog that, "Denmark is unquestionably among the global leaders in every mobile broadband metric we measure, but a lot of Denmark’s success in the OpenSignal World Cup depended on the luck of the draw. Denmark did survive one of our groups of death, but only as runner-up. Thanks to the early 3G stumbles of Australia and South Korea, Denmark managed to avoid the intimidating 4G threat of those Asian countries in the penultimate stages. That, in turn, allowed Denmark to dominate the later rounds, all the way up to its skin-of-its-teeth win over Belgium in the final game."
