Model Summary
- Final Model
- CatBoost
- Training
- 2015–2025
- Forecast
- 2026
- Features
- 178
- Numeric
- 173
- Categorical
- 5
- OOT RMSE
- 0.355865
- Champion Experiment
- base_plus_components
Technical Summary
Methodology
Structured reference for technical recruiters. Implementation clutter omitted.
Validation Design
Each validation season was predicted only using earlier seasons. Rolling out-of-time folds evaluate the model on seasons that were never used for that fold's training. 2026 was never used for model tuning.
2015–2021
→ 2022
RMSE 0.315314
2015–2022
→ 2023
RMSE 0.380906
2015–2023
→ 2024
RMSE 0.370621
2015–2024
→ 2025
RMSE 0.356620
Modelling Pipeline
- Performance Data
- Match-Relative Features
- Coach Intelligence
- CatBoost
- Match Constraint
- Season Forecast
Match Constraint
- →0 ≤ expected vote ≤ 3
- →Sum expected votes per match = 6
Limitations
- Expected votes are forecasts.
- Umpire deliberations are unobserved.
- Historical relationships are not causal.
- Model-ranked Top 3 is not the official ballot.
- Some 2026 context features show distribution shift.