Data geeks serve up this year's Wimbledon champion

Tennis fans might want to look away now, although those who like a flutter might wish to pay close attention as the boffins have crowned the Wimbledon 2019 men’s singles champion, weeks before the final.
A predictive model, built by Alteryx, using over 100 years of historic match data provided by Google-owned online community Kaggle, claims that the final will be between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, with eight-time Wimbledon champion “King Roger” emerging triumphant.
Alteryx chief data and analytics officer Alan Jacobson said: “By building advantage predictive models to garner complex insights we can test the output against past similarly ranked Wimbledon winners to test the accuracy of our predictions.
“Finally, by running the model against the entrants for Wimbledon 2019, we can predict who has the best chance of being crowned the champion of Centre Court.”
Alteryx’s predictive model was also able to determine that the ideal tennis player would be aged 26, weigh 80kg and stand at a height of 6ft 1. Likewise, they would play predominantly with their right-hand, but with a two-handed backhand.
The model also revealed that some attributes provided more of an advantage that others. In matches between similarly ranked players, for example, the winner is often the player with a height advantage
Jacobson added: “Whether you need to serve up big data sets or perform complex analytical predictions to ace the next match, data is changing the way sports are played.
“The ability to exploit match and individual performance data in new ways are helping to determine realistic predictions to gain the winning edge.”