Forecasting Services (The Virtual Tout®)

The Virtual Tout ^® began as an event forecasting service, drawing on prediction markets to pick winning teams, including sports and political teams.

Before there was The Virtual Tout ^® , we published Without a Tout: How to Pick a Winning Team, analyzing the 2007 Major League Baseball regular season from its first game to the beginning of the postseason. With a focus on baseball, the book provided examples of feature engineering in traditional models for predicting the outcome of sporting events. The book set the stage for models in other sports, including college and pro basketball and football, which were part of the The Virtual Tout ^® offering for a number of years. The Virtual Tout ^® became a registered trademark of Research Publishers LLC on July 19, 2011.

Methods originally developed for use in sports betting have been extended into various competitive endeavors, drawing on prediction markets and surveys. Methods from The Virtual Tout ^® were employed in correctly predicting the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election and the Georgia senatorial elections in January 2021.

Origins of The Virtual Tout ^® and methods of election forecasting (audio):

Download the working paper about election forecasting:

Research. Predicting the 2020 Presidential Election

Understanding election simulation used in the paper (audio):

Understanding the figure in the paper (audio):

Research Publishers LLC provides statistical analysis and forecasting in the fields of economics, finance, commerce, business, marketing, politics, and sports. We utilize prediction markets and surveys, making forecasts about the behavior of markets, consumers, and voters.

If you would like to review ideas for a forecasting project, contact us at:
info@research-publishers.expert