Analytics and Wisdom of the Crowd in Sports

In this session we will discuss some issues arising from the Sports Performance Analytics Specialization which we launched earlier this year. The Specialization equips users to construct their own analytic models from raw data using Python, and here we discuss some of the new trends in the arena of sports analytics, with a particular focus on the Wisdom of the Crowd. This is a concept with a long pedigree in statistics, but which has become increasingly relevant to sports as teams attempt to harness the opinions of fans as an aid to player recruitment. The power of the public opinion has been demonstrated somewhat already In the specialization, where we showed how valuations generated by fan forums on the website Transfermarkt can be used as a basis for predicting match outcomes. In this event we're going to dive into this concept a bit more deeply, discussing how the wisdom of the crowd comes up in machine learning, the importance and opportunities of crowd-base signals, and the breadth of places where the Wisdom of the Crowd might be found relevant in the field.