An application of the generalized Poisson difference distribution to the Bayesian modelling of football scores

The analysis of sports data, in particular football match outcomes, has always produced an immense interest among the statisticians. In this paper, we adopt the generalized Poisson difference distribution (GPDD) to model the goal difference of football matches. We discuss the advantages of the proposed model over the Poisson difference (PD) model, which was also used for the same purpose. The GPDD model, like the PD model, is based on the goal difference in each game that allows us to account for the correlation without explicitly modelling it. The main advantage of the GPDD model is its flexi... Mehr ...