Author Andrew Engel

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite webcomics, Math with Bad Drawings, posted a comic in response to his other post, “Why Baseball Statistics Matter”. I really enjoyed Ben Orlin’s explanation because it combines my passion for both baseball and data science. Further, it really resonates with the challenges I’ve seen many companies face as they work to incorporate…

It’s been a fun year in the world of professional tennis. From the men’s tour, we’ve witnessed Novak Djokovik winning in Australia, Rafael Nadal winning in France, and Roger Federer rounding out the continued domination of the Big Three. With the emergence of a new generation on the women’s tour, it’s been exciting to watch Naomi Osaka win in Australia…

This blog is meant to be a fun and unique take on predicting which team will win the Stanley Cup 2019. The Stanley Cup finals begin tonight, and we at DataRobot are curious about the chances of our home team, the Bruins, to win over the St. Louis Blues. Following a similar methodology to Zach Mayer’s March Madness predictions, we…

  In our previous blogs on pitch framing (Part 1, Part 2), we explored the ability of some machine learning techniques to capture nonlinear behavior and promised that by controlling for more factors (pitcher, umpire, etc.) we could improve our model.   Within DataRobot, we reran our process from the previous blog posts, included handedness and pitch type in the…

In our last blog on this subject, we built a machine learning model to predict whether or not a pitch will be called a strike, and used it to evaluate the ability of major league catchers to frame the pitches. In closing, we mentioned that there was a problem with using the logistic regression approach for this model. The problem…

As sports leagues continue to add additional real-time player tracking technologies (e.g. Statcast, NBA player tracking, NFL Next Gen Stats), the amount of data available to analyze and understand (and potentially predict) player performance is growing at an incredible rate. Unfortunately, it is very difficult for us to make sense of this volume of data. The only way to get…