Loading the dataset

In this chapter, we will look at predicting the winner of games of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Matches in the NBA are often close and can be decided in the last minute, making predicting the winner quite difficult. Many sports share this characteristic, whereby the expected winner could be beaten by another team on the right day.

Various research into predicting the winner suggests that there may be an upper limit to sports outcome prediction accuracy which, depending on the sport, is between 70 percent and 80 percent accuracy. There is a significant amount of research being performed into sports prediction, often through data mining or statistics-based methods.

Collecting the data

The data we will be using is the match history data for the NBA for the 2013-2014 season. The website http://Basketball-Reference.com contains a significant number of resources and statistics collected from the NBA and other leagues. To download the dataset, perform the following...