Publications by tlfvincent
On the rise of Big Data and Data Science
This post is going to differ slightly from the data-orientated material that I usually publish. I was recently playing around with the Google trends API and came across some very interesting…well….trends. There has definitely been a huge amount of publicity surrounding “Big Data”, maybe even too much. For those of us who have been working...
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And the most loyal fans in the NBA are…
NBA basketball is the one the sports I enjoy watching the most. As I was ordering my (undisclosed amount)th beer while watching a game during after-work hours, it occurred to me how often I had seen sparsely populated arenas during games, with large areas of seats going unoccupied. This got me to thinking about the average fan attendance for NBA ...
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On the trade history and dynamics of NBA teams
While good draft picks and deft management can help you win championships, there is no doubt that NBA teams can massively gain, or lose, by trading players with one another. Here, I played around with some publicly available data given at basketball-reference.com, and had a look at the numbers behind all trades undertaken in the NBA from 1948...
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On the carbon footprint of the NBA
It’s no secret that I enjoy basketball, but I’ve often wondered about the carbon footprint that can be caused by 30 teams each playing an 82-game season. Ultimately, that’s 2460 air flights across the whole of the USA, each carrying 30+ individuals. For these reasons, I decided to investigate the average distance travelled by each NBA team...
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Using sentiment analysis to predict ratings of popular tv series
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you have probably heard of TV shows such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, How I Met Your Mother or Game of Thrones. While I generally don’t spend a whole lot of time watching TV, I have also undergone some pretty intense binge-watching sessions in the past (they generally coincided with ...
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The luckiest team in the NBA
While the NBA finals are in full swing and the two best teams are battling it out for the ultimate prize, another 28 are now in summer vacation. In order to achieve their goal of still playing this time next year, teams often look to improve their roster through trades, player development, and most importantly, the NBA draft. Through the draft,...
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Competitive balance and home court advantage in the NBA
Two years ago, the entire NBA season went into lockout because of mostly financial reasons. However, one central point was also about keeping a competitive balance within the NBA, so that large and small-market teams alike would have a chance to compete for a championship. THis brings us to the obvious question “Is there competitive balance in ...
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Analyzing package dependencies and download logs from Rstudio, and a start towards building an R recommendation engine
In this post, I will focus on the analysis of available R packages and the behavior of its users. In essence, this involves looking at the data in two different ways (1) relationships among available R packages in CRAN and (2) tracking the behavior of R users through download logs on CRAN mirrors. I will then leverage all this data to make a feeb...
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Comparing the contribution of NBA draft picks
When it comes to the NBA draft, experts tend to argue about a number of things: at which position will a player be selected? what is the best draft class ever? etc… Luckily, the wealth of data made available by the great people of http://www.basketball-reference.com/draft/ make it possible to address a number of these, and other questions. T...
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Finding NBA players with the most similar playing styles
In this post, I leverage the SportVu data available for all NBA players active during the 2014-2015 season to not only infer players with the most similar playing styles, but also teams with the most similar rosters. http://tlfvincent.github.io/2016/03/17/clustering-NBA-players/ Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the lin...
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