Interesting question.
Back some years ago when trifectas were introduced into NSW specifically. A professor from a local university would attend Harold Park(pacing & dogs) - Wentworth Park (dogs), with his students with an idea of quantitatively analysing uncertainty, looking for an answer that could describe information and uncertainty in the language of probability theory.
This was a humble start to what is now called UNhandicapping factors.

Some of his work was actually used each Friday night in the evening paper in the centre racing gold guide.

Basically it involved the splitting of the quinella combination's into two groups, then tracking each individual combo in each group then finding the average losing sequence an algorithm was applied to this sequence which would provide a target number of losing days for each combo, once a combo had reached this point, an investment was triggered on selected quinella combos and extending into trifectas.

It is worthwhile to investigate, but once you realise the potential, thats when you will start looking for the big Lotto pools etc around the place as the fertile places for investment.