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v2 March Madness Model: 🤖 You Can't Spell "Champion" without AI! 🤖

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Another year, another (improved) March Madness AI bracket model! I'm building an AI model again (while using AI to help build it) to help me fill out my bracket. From year 1 to (now) year 6 of my journey in creating bracket models, I have advanced from building super simple logistic regression models to more technically complex ensemble models for predictions - encompassing architectures from XGBoost to Neural Networks. This year brings 2 new additions to my approach: putting my ensemble of models to work by simulating the bracket 10,000 times, as well as creating a Women's March Madness model (which I hope to submit alongside my Men's predictions for Kaggle's annual March Madness Learning Mania competition). Combining my love of basketball with data science excites me, & this year I focused on improving existing data science functionality from my existing models rather than building from scratch. As mentioned in my post last year, my yearly predictions have ten...
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Using AI for Fantasy Baseball & Football Drafting

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Here's how Claude has built my $1M side hustle that works for me while I sleep: Just kidding! For those of you who made it through my AI slop intro, I'm planning to start writing monthly blog posts outlining my experiments with AI - about real use cases and learnings as I play around with AI. It's undeniable how much software coding has changed with LLMs even in the past 3 months, so I've taken it upon myself to build more through fun side projects. I love sports, and so I hope to make many of my AI learning projects centered around sports applications! 🏈 Fantasy Football 🏈 The best way to ring in the end of summer? Football and AI! 🍁 🏈 🤖 Continuing my AI in sports theme, I built a fantasy football drafting tool (customizable for any league's settings and positional draft preferences)! Five expert sources are synthesized using Plackett-Luce, a model that turns ranked lists into a consensus (even when sources disagree/leave players out entirely). A Bay...
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Building a Full NBA Betting Model from Scratch to Beat Polymarket

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Building an NBA Betting Model from Scratch (& Putting It on the Internet!) For years, I've wanted to build an NBA betting model. The NBA is my favorite sport to watch (I watch a LOT of basketball), & building predictive models on sports datasets is one of my favorite ways to spend time practicing Machine Learning techniques. Whenever I build & share predictive basketball models with friends, their follow-up question is almost always: "When are you going to make a model for sports betting?" This use case felt like the perfect next project - both predicting NBA betting market imperfections while also making it live & easily accessible for realtime analysis. But I always struggled where to start with this; specifically, what data to pull, & how to compare my model's predictions against a relevant & publicly available market price. A few weeks ago, I finally cracked it: the result is a 5-model stacked ensemble predictor (trained on >10k regu...
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NBA Betting Model - Beating the House

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   $150 billion per year. According to  legalsportsbetting.com , that’s a conservative projection for the monetary size of the betting industry for 2021. To put that into context, that is higher than the market capitalization of Starbucks. By 2025,  marketwatch.com  estimates $8 billion in yearly revenue on its own in the sports betting industry. That is like buying over 420 Bitcoin per day for an entire year (as of the 4/23/2021 BTC price).     The prevalence of online betting platforms and apps – like FanDuel and DraftKings – make it extremely easy and fun to bet on any given game or player. The increased interconnectivity amongst sports league and sports media outlets also engenders increased exposure to the betting landscape. For instance, ESPN recently aired a “ BetCast ” stream for a Philadelphia 76ers vs Brooklyn Nets primetime game featuring graphics and statistics throughout of various prop bets and odds. Once a taboo in sports talk shows, a v...
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Making the Perfect March Madness Bracket – An (Impossible) Tradition Unlike Any Other

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               Maybe this will be the year. I have watched a lot of college basketball, and I have a pretty good feel on which teams may be legitimate contenders versus the frauds. Maybe, just maybe, I can pick the perfect bracket this time around. Or at least make the best bracket in my pool and win some money. Maybe I have finally figured out something that others have not…               This is often the mindset of millions of college basketball fans come March (myself included). Every year, once the final version of my bracket (or top 5-10 versions) has been submitted, a very small piece of me truly believes that I have built one of the best brackets in the country. However, regardless of my confidence year in and year out, my bracket’s results often look like I had just flipped a coin on every game by the end. With a 1 in 120 billion chance in crafting a perfect bracket accor...
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