Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this “transformers” thing and, like, football, right? It sounds kinda weird, but I had this idea to see if I could get a model to, I don’t know, maybe predict game outcomes or something. It’s probably a dumb idea, but I wanted to try it anyway.
First, I needed to get my hands on some data. I mean, where do you even start? I ended up finding some random datasets online, csv format. Not ideal, but hey, it’s a start. These files had stuff like scores, teams, dates, and maybe some other basic stats. I did not check it carefully.
Then came the coding part. I’m no expert, okay? I’m just a regular dude who likes to tinker. I installed transformers and other packages,I fired up a Jupyter Notebook because, well, that’s what everyone seems to use. I copy paste code to read in my janky CSV files. Lots of Googling, Stack Overflow, the usual drill. It’s like, “Why isn’t this working?!” half the time.
Next, I had to “clean” the data, which is a fancy way of saying “make sure the computer doesn’t freak out.” I had to deal with missing values, weird formats, and all that jazz. I basically just filled in some blanks with averages or dropped some rows. Again, not a pro, just winging it.
Now for the “transformers” part, which is still kind of magic to me. I picked a pre-trained model – I think it was BERT or something? Honestly, I just grabbed one that sounded popular. I figured, “If it works for text, maybe it’ll work for football scores?” Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch.
- Load model.
- Load tokenizer.
- Tokenize input.
I spent a ton of time just trying to format the data in a way the model could understand. Like, how do you turn “Team A vs. Team B, Score: 2-1” into something a bunch of numbers? It involved a lot of trial and error, and more Googling, naturally. I also add [CLS],[SEP] * involved tokenizing, padding, and a bunch of other stuff I barely understand.
Then came the “training”, which is where the computer supposedly “learns”.I try to use GPU to accelerate training. I just let it run, and it spit out a bunch of numbers and charts. I pretended to know what they meant. Honestly, it looked like a bunch of squiggly lines to me. I change learning rate, epoch. Change, change, change, and test. I keep small, increase batch size.
The Result (or Lack Thereof)
So, did it work? Well, no, not really. I mean, I got it to run without crashing, which is a win in my book. But did it accurately predict football scores? Nope. It was basically random guessing.
But hey, I learned a few things. I learned that data is a pain, transformers are complicated, and I’m probably not going to be revolutionizing football analytics anytime soon. Still, it was a fun little project. Maybe I’ll try something else next time. Maybe basketball? Or maybe I’ll just stick to watching the games instead of trying to predict them.