How PhD Procrastination led to Prize-Winning Methodology: Forecasting the 2026 Commonwealth Games Medals Table

Kirsty Ryman, Matthew Parker and Teng Wei Yeo (University of Glasgow)

Wednesday 30th September 12:00-13:00
Maths 311B

Abstract

This year’s prediction competition organised by the Statistics in Sport section of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), was to predict the medal table for the 2026 Commonwealth Games.  Submissions were evaluated using Kendall's rank correlation coefficient. In this seminar, we describe and evaluate the development of a novel two-stage prediction framework that was awarded one of the competition's two methodology prizes.  In the first stage, we construct the performance index: a continuous measure of a country's sporting success based on historical medal outcomes. In the second stage, this performance index is modelled as a response, using a binomial-gamma hurdle model to generate our predictions. We will discuss the motivation behind the approach, key modelling decisions, and the challenges encountered during development. Following the release of the competition results, we also present a post-event analysis of our model's performance compared to other submissions and highlight potential improvements for future competitions.

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