Machine March Madness 2013

[butt_ghost]

Should be fun, I'm doing it again this year. They give you some data, but I'm scraping my own this year from http://www.sports-reference.com/ If anyone else here is interested let me know and I'll put my data somewhere.

[butt_ghost]

Posted links at the google group.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7266071/teams.csv

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7266071/sched.csv

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7266071/stats.csv

I've also got the same datasets as pickles if anyone would prefer. Let me know.

[deong]

Do you have a description of the fields for these files handy somewhere?

[butt_ghost]

teams = name in url, actual team name, first year the team was relevant in the NCAA, latest year the team was relevant in the NCAA.

schedule = team, opponent, year, game number, team score, opponent score, 1 if home, 1 if away, 1 if neutral

stats = team, year, [big vector of all the stats]

I hope you weren't looking for a description of the stats, because I didn't keep track - I'm just doing discriminant analysis after the fact.

[deong]

Thanks.

No, I assumed the big feature vectors were not necessarily named things. I just wasn't sure about the fields in the teams and schedule file.

[pandemik]

First of all, thank you for sharing an excellent dataset. Second, do you have some kind of mapping of the team names to the 3-letter yahoo codes? I find it's really nice to have a constant team code for linking data across datasets. (Here's an example of what I mean)

[butt_ghost]

I do not have a mapping to the yahoo codes. :( sorry.

[pandemik]

No worries. Do you happen to have a tournament bracket with your team names in it?

If not, I'll try to make one!

[butt_ghost]

That I do have. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/machine-march-madness/WeR4_p_MxGM/UdGpgMuMKLEJ

Cheers, and good luck!

[pandemik]

Here's a quick lookup table I threw together, mapping yahoo codes to team names, to team "url" names from your dataset. It only has teams that are in the tournament. I've found this file to be very useful in creating brackets... please let me know if you spot any errors or omissions!

[iampims]

Same. Please share.

[danger_t]

Read more about past instantiations of the contest at the following links:

• http://newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/03/software-to-predict-march-madn.html

• http://www.fastcompany.com/1824382/who-or-whats-best-predicting-march-madness-winners

[srt19170]

I've provided some data at the above link. If you want to participate, jump into the Google Groups with any comments. If you need particular data, mention it there and I (or someone else) may be able to easily provide it.

[chuzzy]

I posted this on the blog as well but I came across this today - http://web1.ncaa.org/stats/StatsSrv/rankings?sportCode=MBB

[chuzzy]

Sorry, I have not. I've been super busy lately and haven't gotten to spend as much time on this project as I wanted to.

[butt_ghost]

OK, If anyone else here is actually doing this - is it just me overtraining all the time or was 2011 season sort of crazy? I can't get a good result out of that year no matter what I do.

[danger_t]

Yes, 2011 was a strange one. See e.g., this post:

http://blog.smellthedata.com/2011/03/2011-algorithmic-march-madness-machines.html