Foundations of Sports Analytics: Data, Representation, and Models in Sports

This week introduces a simple example of sports analytics in practice - the calculation of the Pythagorean expectation to model winning in team sports. This can also be used for the purposes of prediction. Examples are developed for five different sports leagues, Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Hockey League (NHL), the English Premier League (EPL-soccer) and the Indian Premier League (IPL-cricket).

This week will use NBA data to introduce basic and important Python codes to conduct data cleaning and data preparation. This week also discusses summary and descriptive analyses with statistics and graphs to understand the distribution of data, the characteristics and pattern of variables as well as the relationship between two variables. At the end of this week, we will introduce correlation coefficients to summarize the linear relationship between two variables.

This module introduces some ways of representing data using examples from MLB, the NBA and Indian Premier League. MLB data is used to analyze the spatial distribution of different hits. NBA data is used to generate heatmaps to illustrate the different ways in which players contribute. IPL data is used to show how team performances can be compared graphically.

This week introduces the fundamentals of regression analysis. We will discuss how to perform regression analysis using Python and how to interpret regression output. We will use NHL data to estimate multiple regression models to identify the team level performance factors that affect the team's winning percentage. We will also use cricket data from the Indian Premier League to run regression analyses to examine whether player performance impacts player salary.