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Neural Networks
I've always been interested in NNs for horse racing since I first heard of them several years ago. I realize that many have used them with varying degrees of success or failure. I also realize that many prefer regression analysis over NNs, however, while being very good at math and logic, I am not highly educated in the higher forms of math or programming, which would be required to get into regression based work.
I have on my computer a couple of spreadsheet based NN programs that I downloaded off the internet, free of course, and have messed around with them some. I did create a NN for drag racing (bracket racing) as I crew for a friend who runs a gas dragster. This NN is very basic, having only 5 inputs and 2 outputs. The key to this one is being able to predict your next ET (elapsed time) as you must post what you think your ET will be prior to the race, which is then used by the timer to program the "Christmas tree" lights, thereby spotting the competitor or receiving a spot from the competitor. This little program works surprisingly well. However, this NN only has to train on 1 car, not even caring about the capabilities of the other competitor in the race. So you can train it using data from previous runs and simply have it predict the next ET for the same car.
Horseracing is a different story, as you can imagine, more inputs are involved for each horse and there are several horses involved in each race and there will be, many times, more than 1 horse that can affect how the race is run (pace of the race). Also, I have not figured out how one would be able to input today's prerace data; distance, post positions, weights, etc., into the NN, or if that data is even needed.
The output(s) would depend on what one wants to predict; final times, pace times, speed figures, finish positions, final B/Ls, etc.. It would be nice to be able to predict all the entries' finish positions or final B/Ls, but that would require having multiple outputs. Would you need to run the predictor for each horse in order to predict the desired output for each horse in the race? Or could you input all the horses' data and get an output for each horse?
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