Inside the TRC Rankings machine at the Breeders’ Cup and the Melbourne Cup

Highest-rated: Melbourne Cup winner Without A Fight (Mark Zahra) was clear top-rated on TRC Rankings – as were six of the nine winners on Breeders’ Cup Saturday. Photo: Pat Scala/Racing Photos

Find out how the TRC Rankings fared at Santa Anita and Flemington

 

A unique aspect of TRC Global Rankings is their automated computation. As detailed in our documentation, races are rated – and rankings compiled – by machine intelligence.

Back in 2014, we gave the system three years of global results in which to train, after which it was up to the computer. And each year since, the rankings have become more accurate. Because of the complexity of the problem, learning will go on for many years to come.

In some races, there simply is not enough information for the computer to rank the horses as well as it might, for only Group and Graded races, along with a select few others, are included in our dataset. But when good horses with lots of form get together, the rankings tend to become more predictive.

On Breeders’ Cup Saturday, for instance, six of the nine races was won by the highest-ranked horse according to the TRC Global Rankings, while easy Melbourne Cup winner was also by far the highest-ranked runner in the Lexus Melbourne Cup (which is included in this week’s rankings one week earlier than technically should be the case, to provide the interested reader with the computer’s analysis).

For each of the featured races, the horses are listed in finishing order with last week’s ranking before their name and their best three previous performance ratings. In red, is how the computer rated each race and the rankings changes enforced.

This should provide a feel for how the computer tries to use each race to sort out all horses across the world into a coherent hierarchy, so long as they have run in qualifying races.

• Best three TRC Computer Race Ratings given after each horse’s name; shaded horses are highest-ranked in race by TRC Global Rankings

View the latest TRC Global Rankings for horses / jockeys / trainers / sires

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