DATE: | Wed, Sept 11, 2013 |
TIME: | 11:45 am |
PLACE: | Council Room (SITE 5-084) |
TITLE: | Use of Performance Metrics to Forecast Success in the National Hockey League |
PRESENTER: | Josh Weissbock University of Ottawa |
ABSTRACT:
Predicting success in hockey is an important area of research which has received little attention in the sports data
mining community. We are the first to propose a machine learning approach to forecast success in the National Hockey
League. Our approach combines traditional statistics, such as goals for and against, and performance metrics such as
possession and luck, in order to build a classification model. We construct several classification models with novel
features such as possession and luck in order to build a classification model. Our results indicate that Neural
Networks construct the most robust classification models. This confirms the work of earlier researchers, who have
also employed Neural Networks in other sports data mining domains. Our results also show the statistics of PDO (which
shows, in the short term, the teams playing better or worse than the expected variance) does not aid the prediction.
We will also discuss random chance in the standings, playoff series predictions instead of a single game prediction,
and the use of Natural Language Processing technique to predict based on written commentaries about the teams.
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