PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ben Bettisworth
AU  - Alexandros Stamatakis
TI  - Phylourny: Predicting the Knock-out-phase of Tournaments via Phylogenetic Methods by example of the UEFA EURO 2020
AID  - 10.1101/2021.06.24.449715
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.06.24.449715
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/25/2021.06.24.449715.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/25/2021.06.24.449715.full
AB  - The prediction of knock-out tournaments represents an area of large public interest and active academic as well as industrial research. Here, we leverage the computational analogies between calculating the so-called phylogenetic likelihood score used in the area of molecular evolution and efficiently calculating, instead of approximating via simulations, the exact per-team winning probabilities, given a pairwise win probability matrix P. We implement and make available our method as open-source code and deploy it to calculate the winning probabilities for all teams participating at the knock-out phase of the UEFA EURO 2020 football tournament. We use three different P matrices to conduct predictions, two inferred via our own simple method and one computed by experts in the field. According to this expert P matrix which we trust most, we find that the most probable final is France versus England and that England has a slightly higher probability to win the title. The ability to efficiently and exactly compute winning probabilities, apart from improving and accelerating predictions, might allow for the development of novel methods to compute P.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.