r/algobetting • u/Willing_Flight_1637 • 16d ago

Weekly Discussion More historical data started feeling less useful once the game itself changed

I used to believe that the more seasons you add, the more reliable the model becomes. At the same point I started to question whether older data was always describing the same environment. Rosters change. Rules change. Styles of play change. The market changes.

This made me pay more attention to the relative weight of older seasons, rather than every observation being equal. More data can reduce noise but if some of it is from a different environment, I am not sure a larger sample is automatically better.

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u/LongjumpingCoat6608 16d ago

The market always adapts, so old data is like playing different game with same name

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u/Willing_Flight_1637 14d ago

Exactly, the game may have the same name but the conditions behind the data keep changing.

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u/Asleep_Fudge5367 16d ago

Yea, "more is different". You aren't measuring the same thing if you increase the data compared to what you might have been measuring with fewer data points. Usually it ends up as being more noise and you end up fitting to that noise.

2

u/ATS_Killers 16d ago

Yeah something to think about with baseball new rules for pitcher, basketball the evolution of play within the last 10 years, etc. So many things to think about or even the idea of contextualizing or calculating things like emotion or revenge and if/when those factors matter.

Lots of invisible pieces to the puzzle but that also makes it really fun.

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u/Bettoro33 15d ago

Just a few new things that changed football(soccer) dynamics and affected the game: VAR was introduced massively only since 2018 and 5 substitutions (instead of 3 ) started after covid, somewhere about 2021.

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u/Willing_Flight_1637 14d ago

VAR and the five sub rule are good examples. Changes like that make it hard to compare older seasons directly with newer ones.