Bohemia's data and attribution team has spent the last two years building a data intelligence platform called 'The Brain'. Now its power has been harnessed to pick the winner of the Melbourne Cup.
Usually the team undertake customised data projects that fuse disparate data sets in unconventional ways to solve client problems. But not today, not today. Now we get to see how good The Brain really is. After crunching through just about all the cup data out there, The Brain reckons Fiorente will win in under three minutes 22 seconds.
But it's a tough call. Even The Brain, with its mighty calculus, has doubts. Yesterday it thought Fawkner would win. And Bohemia, while cautiously optimistic, has inserted a disclaimer that would make Ernst & Young proud.
It reads:
Please note that this model is not intended to be taken seriously. It has been produced with the primary purpose of enjoyment. Bohemia and the Bohemia data & attribution team have limited knowledge of horse racing and in no way does this document constitute professional advice nor should you rely on the content of this document when undertaking any gambling activities.
Head of digital James Collier is hedging his bets: “Data intelligence sits at the heart of our agency operating system and we wanted to help point those inevitable race day bets toward the runner with a statistically sound chance of winning. That said, and as most punters have experienced, predicting the Melbourne Cup is likely to remain an impossible or at least a highly improbable task!
Nevertheless, Collier told AdNews he's put his money The Brain's mouth is and piled in to its prediction. As has Steve Wright, data and attribution director.
"With so much coverage and anticipation around the race we became curious as to whether we could predict the result,” said Wright. “The more we explored the possibility the more data we found and the more signals we could feed into the model. The end result is an exciting analysis of the known race influencers with a little Bohemia secret sauce mixed in for good measure."
Click the image below to download the document. It is well worth it. Then decide: Will you back The Brain?
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