Predicting the Home Team's Final Margin: A Competition Amongst Predictive Algorithms

With fewer than half-a-dozen home-and-away rounds to be played, it's time I was posting to the Simulations blog, but this year I wanted to see if I could find a better algorithm than OLS for predicting the margins of victory for each of the remaining games.
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Picking Winners - A Deeper Dive

Last blog I identified a banker's dozen of algorithms that I thought were worthy of further consideration for Fund honours next season.

Experience has taught me that, behind the attractive veneer of some models with impressive historical ROIs often lurk troubling pathologies. One form of that pathology is exhibited by models with returns that come mostly from a handful of bets, one or two of them especially fortuitous. Another manifests as a 'bet large, bet often' approach that would subject any human on the business end of such wagering to the punting equivalent of a ride on The Big Dipper that's just as likely to end with you 100 metres above the ground as 200 metres below it. The question to be answered in this blog then is: do any of the 11 algorithms I've identified this time show any such characteristics?
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