Nearest Neighbours

Find the nearest match to your horse in PFL

Finding your horse's nearest Neigh-bour

You know how your horse's attributes are hidden until retirement? Wouldn't it be great if you could figure out what those attributes were while the horse was still active? That could help you find the optimal distance and conditions. It might give you a clue as to which horse you should try to claim or buy on the marketplace. Well the obvious way to calcluate those hidden attributes is to build some regression model. That's too obvious. Let's instead use some more elegant techniques.

How it works

Each active horse has its average finish time calculated for every combination of distance, direction, surface and condition. There are 9 unique distances and 5 potential conditions - making 45 unique conditions combinations per archetype, and 4 archetypes (LT, LD, RT and RD).

The logic being that if you find a horse with similar average finish times across different combinations of distances and conditions, that horse probably has similar attributes. This gives you some insight into your horse. Rather than trying to directly predict each attribute (which is kind of dull, but would work to some extent) we are trying to predict a good comp for your horse. Imagine Caleb Williams coming into the NFL and a draft expert says he's like Aaron Rodgers. That's kind of what we are doing through the power of comparable race performances. As you might expect this is quite nuanced and the results can be improved over time. So for now consider this the Alpha version of this page.

Today this Alpha release only uses one technique - Euclidian distance to find the nearest neighbours (lower score is better). In future releases we will add other techniques and improve the performance of this app. The results can be a bit interesting, but hopefully this is a useful app to uncovering more about your horses, in order to run them more efficiently. There are some kinks to iron out - remember this is just the Alpha. Data is accurate up to the 18th December 2024 currently only.