Predicting March Madness: 1st Place Winner, Zach Bradshaw

We recently wrapped up our second annual March Machine Learning Mania competition with an industry insider finishing at the top of the leaderboard.

First place finisher, Zach Bradshaw, is a Sports Analytics Specialist at ESPN. Prior to joining ESPN, he worked in the basketball analytics departments of the Phoenix Suns and Charlotte Bobcats (now renamed the Charlotte Hornets). Zach received a Masters of Science in Statistics from Brigham Young University in 2014.

How did you get started in data science and sports analytics?

From a young age, I was passionate about sports and enjoyed solving interesting problems. However, it was not until later in college that I had an unanticipated opportunity to intern with an NBA team. Thanks to good timing, hard work, and my previous basketball research, I was fortunate enough to get an internship doing what I love, applying data science in basketball.

What made you enter the March Mania competition on Kaggle?

As soon as I heard about the March Mania competition, I wanted to participate due to my interest in basketball and predictive modeling. I had previously done some predictive modeling for NBA games and this competition was the perfect opportunity to apply similar techniques to college basketball.

How did your industry knowledge help you create your dataset and model?

My previous experience modeling NBA games guided my approach in the competition. Both the dataset and modeling techniques closely resembled my previous work.

Did you use any intuition or industry knowledge to manually tweak your output probabilities?

Using a Bayesian framework allowed for the incorporation of prior knowledge or intuition that was not accounted for in the data. However, in hindsight this hurt my predictions slightly more than it helped, at least in the 2015 tournament. There were no tweaks to the output probabilities of my first entry. However, with my winning entry, I manually tweaked the prediction for the Baylor vs. Georgia State game. With a series of unlikely events at the end of that game, I successfully “predicted” the upset.

How did your experience in sports and sports analytics help you succeed in this competition?

My experience in sports analytics saved a lot of time in the exploratory phase as I already had a sense of what data and techniques might make a good model. My experience with basketball had a small impact on how I modeled a few nuances of the game. Although my experience in sports analytics was helpful in succeeding in the competition, the gains were marginal and I also needed some good luck to succeed.

Which tools did you use?

R and SQL

Do you have any advice for those just getting started in data science and sports analytics?

All models are wrong but some are useful, don’t get too caught up in trying to create the perfect model. Taking some time to better understand the problem at hand and its underlying structure is an important and oft overlooked step in the modeling process. For those specifically interested in sports analytics, I think the best way to get started is doing your own research. Like any other industry, connections are important and having some of your own research is the first important step in developing relationships with others in the industry.

Originally published at blog.kaggle.com on April 17, 2015.