Title of Project: NBA Game winner Prediction

Group Two:
1. Efendi Zaenudin: ID: 106225007
2. Eskezeia Yihunie: ID: 106225008

Introduction
Basketball is one the most popular games in the United States and also has much popularity
abroad. Due to its popularity, everyone is eager to know which team will win the game. Statistics
in sports have been an important tool for coaches to evaluate the team and player sports
performance (Leite et al., 2009).

Throughout the years of competitive basketball, numerous methods of game registration and
analysis have been created, with the objective to precisely and objectively our objective in this
project is to attempt predicting the outcomes of Basketball matches before they happen based on
the characteristics of the two teams that are competing.

Currently, basketball is one of the most analyzed sport disciplines. The analyses of the statistical
reports allow coaches to evaluate the technical and tactical efficiency of players and teams, and
to compare them during single game performance, as well as during the whole season. They also
help players to develop basketball skills based on recorded factors (Gomez et al, 2010).
Currently the NBA (National Basketball Association) registers games and performs statistical
analysis of them including the smallest details (Oliver, 2004).

In predicting of NBA games based on machine learning methods (Torres 213) the goal is to
survey several machine learning methods on a limited of features. The major contributions were
great staring to feature set starting point for predicting NBA seasons 2006 -2012. It was also
determined that linear classifier are particularly strong at NBA game prediction.

1
The obtained data consist of information of particular players and teams. The winner of the NBA
competition is unofficially classified as a world champion. For that reason recorded statistics
have been so valuable for further analysis. Team statistics are related to the level of tactical
preparation and game strategy.

Methods
In this project, the following steps are included. Collecting data from website:
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2017_games.html and
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2018_games.html , next preprocessing the
data and using several classification methods were used. Great amount of time and effort was
spent feature extraction and getting the latest NBA seasons. Furthermore, extracting novel
features such as ranking of standings.

Data collection

First useful data is collected and then training and testing ratio for classification is determined for
analysis. One last feature that was included was rank of standings. Every team usually has rank
of standing perform better than the rest of their teammates. It would be beneficial to know if any
members of the current team ranking of standings and cannot participate in a match. Moreover,
home last win and visitor’s last win are important features to predict which team wins.

MODEL FOR CLASSIFICATION

In order to predict the outcome of a game, several machine learning algorithms were used:
Decision Tree and Random forest is used.

2
Basic structure of the Model

Our machine learning model will take information about two teams (Home win and Visitor win)
as input, and then output is a probability of Home winning that matchup.

Home Wins
Information Probability of
Model Home wins

Visitor Wins
Information

The performance of each algorithm was measured using 10-fold cross validation, and tuned
accordingly.Once each algorithm was appropriately tuned, game prediction was done in one of
two ways. In the first approach, each classifier was trained on a subset of the previous NBA
season. The more data that was trained on for the current season, the less data was trained on
from the prior season. Intuitively, we expected this to be more accurate than always training on
the full previous season, which was our second approach. After training on either a subset or the
full previous season, the classifiers were also trained with the entire current season prior to the
game being predicted. This approach essentially gave us an "online" classifier which allows us to
predict NBA games before they even happen. Both models are illustrated below.

3
Results
We used training data from NBA_201710_201802_BasketBall and testing data March 2018,
training data NBA_201710_201803_BasketBall and testing data April 2018.

We used the python to facilitate the execution and experimental comparisons of performance of
our predictive model. Table I shows the 10-fold cross-validation results, for both classification
and Decision tree included in this study. In this study we used decision tree for classification
NBA wining prediction using features home last win, ranking of standings and visitors last win.
For this classification and the higher prediction accuracy is 65.2 percent.

Table I

We also used random forest for classification and we got the overall mean accuracy of 67.3%

We also tried to add more features in our experiment, however the overall currency is low as
compared to the above classification accuracy with three features and hence in our project, tree
features that is home last win, ranking of standings and visitors last win gave bather accuracy for
decision tree and Random forest algorithms in predicting NBA win prediction. We tried many

4
experiments to come up with Good results (please refer to Video link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcS54UyN2rQ). We found that for testing data march
season, we got only 57% correctly prediction for home win and 55% correctly prediction visitors
win whereas, for testing for April season 56% correctly prediction for home win and 54% for
visitors win 54% correct prediction.

References

1. Leite N, Baker J., Sampaio J . Paths to expertise in Portuguese national team athletes. J Sport Sci
Med . 2009; 8 (4): 560 – 566. [PMC free article] [PubMed]
2. Gomez MA , Lorenzo A , Ortega E , Sampaio J , Ibanez SJ . Game-related statistics
discriminating between starters and nonstarters players in Women’s National Basketball
Association League (WNBA) . J Sport SciMed . 2009 ; 8 : 278 – 283 . [PMC free
article] [PubMed]
3. Oliver D . What wins basketball games, a review of “Basketball on paper: Rules and tools for
performance analysis” . PolomacBooks . 2005 : 26 – 85 .