After the topsy-turvy month of January in England’s Premier League, UNU sorted things nicely to start February by posting a sterling 7-3 won-loss record for last weekend’s matches. This weekend, the Premiership offers a challenging group of games to forecast.
Before each weekly diary of games, researchers at Unanimous AI bring together 40 Premier League fans on UNU to pick the results of games as a swarm. The swarm not only attempts to pick the winners of games, but also assigns a level of confidence to all the picks being made. That allows the Unanimous AI team to create a weighted list of picks each week based on that expressed confidence.
To see how that works, and why it’s so important, let’s look at one of this week’s most interesting matches in some detail. On Saturday, Everton head north to Teesside to play Middlesbrough at the Riverside Stadium. It promises to be a tough match for both teams. While Everton has looked sharp of late, they’ve played unevenly away from home. For their part, Boro’s defensive style typically becomes even sterner when playing at home while they fight to escape relegation. On paper, this looks like a tough match to call, and oddsmakers have installed Everton as only the mildest of favorites. UNU sees things a bit differently, however.
Looking at that swarm carefully, you’ll see that a consensus formed fairly quickly for Everton, with the only question being the goal margin chosen. Eventually the swarm landed on Everton by a goal with 80% Brainpower. That Brainpower is a strong indicator of how confident the swarm feels about this decision. Unanimous AI adds an additional question to see just how far the swarm’s confidence extends.
That $63 bet confidence metric is very important. Don’t take it as a wagering recommendation by any means, but do look at how it sets confidence in Everton winning a tough road game as the third most-confident pick for this weekend. In fact, UNU has more confidence in the Toffees than it does in league leading Chelsea at Burnley, or Arsenal hosting Hull City. We’ll know whether that confidence was well-founded by Saturday afternoon.
Here’s the rest of UNU’s picks for the weekend matches in the Premier League. Just click on the table to see a bigger version with clickable replays of each swarm decision.
Swarms on UNU pick the winners of Premier League games all season long. If you’d like to get our picks on these games, as well as our forecasts on everything from movies to music to politics and beyond, please drop us a line below.
