It's also Goldman Sachs and UBS choosing to attach their names to these and stake some reputation on these predictions. If they had hit the bullseye, they would be lauding these results.
For example, imagine a tournament with a large number of participants, where the winner is picked simply by fairly choosing a single random participant.
If I then gave you all the perfect historical data going back decades, you could do statistical analysis and determine that the winner is completely random and therefore the probability of success, for any particular participant, is p~=(1/n), where n is the number of participants. Your confidence in correctly predicting any particular outcome will drop as n rises.
Not everything can be easily predicted just because you have enough data.
The World Cup predictions from Goldman Sachs (and also UBS) are a form of recreation and entertainment with machine learning. It's an expression of quant nerd humor.
Analogous intellectual games would be engineers devising ridiculous Rube Goldberg contraptions[1] or programmers building "enterprise" FizzBuzz[2].
(I think it would add to the fun if GS uploaded their raw data and models to Github for others to play with.)
>It certainly didn't predict the final opposing France and Croatia on Sunday.
True, but it did predict France having better chance winning overall but was handicapped by a tougher draw. It also predicted France beating Croatia in round 16 instead of the final. The pdf says:
>While Germany is more likely to get to the final, France has a marginally higher overall chance of winning the tournament,
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_Machine_Contest#...
[2] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...