Data experts predict Championship matchday four results for West Brom, Birmingham City, Leeds United, Ipswich Town and rivals - gallery

The Sky Bet Championship has already reached its fourth round of fixtures for the 2023/24 season and there have been some early indications at both ends of the table as to which teams could come out on top in various battles.

From the title race seeing Ipswich Town emerge as a surprise candidate to Birmingham City dreaming of a play-off campaign after a dream unbeaten start, there have been lots of shocks. Things can of course change with so long to go, but forms have definitely developed.

With that in mind, although we won’t be predicting the overall Championship standings this week, we’ve been able to have a look at each of this weekend’s fixtures in detail – thanks to help from the data expert simulations at BetVictor.

The data expert model adopts the Monte Carlo method, at its heart is a Python-based match simulator that uses two Poisson distributions – one for the home team and one for the away team – to anticipate the number of goals each team could score in a match.

A Poisson distribution is a powerful mathematical concept that predicts the probability of a given number of events (in this case, goals) happening in a fixed interval of time. The key input to a Poisson distribution is the ‘lambda’ (λ) value, which represents the average rate of an event’s occurrence.