Cheng, G.; Zhang, Z.; Kyebambe, M.N.; Kimbugwe, N. Predicting the Outcome of NBA Playoffs Based on the Maximum Entropy Principle. Entropy2016, 18, 450.
Cheng, G.; Zhang, Z.; Kyebambe, M.N.; Kimbugwe, N. Predicting the Outcome of NBA Playoffs Based on the Maximum Entropy Principle. Entropy 2016, 18, 450.
Cheng, G.; Zhang, Z.; Kyebambe, M.N.; Kimbugwe, N. Predicting the Outcome of NBA Playoffs Based on the Maximum Entropy Principle. Entropy2016, 18, 450.
Cheng, G.; Zhang, Z.; Kyebambe, M.N.; Kimbugwe, N. Predicting the Outcome of NBA Playoffs Based on the Maximum Entropy Principle. Entropy 2016, 18, 450.
Abstract
Predicting the outcome of a future game between two National Basketball Association (NBA) teams poses a challenging problem of interest to statistical scientists as well as the general public. In this article, we formalize the problem of predicting the game results as a classification problem and apply the principle of maximum entropy to construct NBA maximum entropy (NBAME) model that fits to discrete statistics for NBA games, and then predict the outcomes of NBA playoffs by the NBAME model. The best NBAME model is able to correctly predict the winning team 74.4 percent of the time as compared to some other machine learning algorithms which is correct 69.3 percent of the time.
Keywords
Maximum entropy model; K-means clustering; accuracy; classification; sports forecasting
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Computational Mathematics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
