Premium
An Extreme‐Value Model for Predicting the Results of Horse Races
Author(s) -
Henery R. J.
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series c (applied statistics)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.205
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9876
pISSN - 0035-9254
DOI - 10.2307/2347436
Subject(s) - mathematics , statistics , value (mathematics) , extreme value theory , econometrics
SUMMARY Results of horse races in 1979–80 are analysed to see if the extreme‐value distribution can model the times to run horse races: horses with the same bookmakers' odds of winning are classed as one group; the distribution of times for each group is extreme‐value with location parameter β depending on the win odds; and the scale parameter 8 is common to all groups. The model predicts that the win probability p for the group is p = exp ((β 0 – β)/θ) for some constant β 0 , and this is borne out by the data. Only the tail of the empirical distribution functions is consistent with the model; however, it is essentially this tail which determines the win probabilities, so if the aim is to do just that the model will serve a useful purpose.