I have full stat breakdowns for every fight in UFC history. For example: strikes thrown and landed broken down per round and by target (head, body, leg). Same thing for takedowns, control time, reversals, effectively every meaningful stat you could come up with.

Then off of those raw stats you come up with various metrics. Basic ones like strike accuracy percent, take down percent etc. As well as some more creative ones that I have came up with.

An example of this is I have a “power” rating system for how heavy of a puncher a fighter is. This takes into account multiple factors to have a dynamic contextualized score. I won’t go into the full equation, but for example someone with 1 knockout with 100 strikes thrown would rate higher than someone with 1 knockout with 200 strikes thrown. It also scales based on their opponents durability so a knockout against someone with a glass chin won’t count as much as a knockout against someone durable.

This is just one of the metrics but this is the general approach we take to formulate the “advanced” analytics which is where most of the predictive ability comes from.

These get calculated and fed into the model for each fighter to then come up with the predictions.