Chapter 1 Overview

March is here, and everyone is talking about the NCAA tournament. Being a UNC fan, the talk this year is whether or not we will make the tournament. After watching ESPN talk about the seeding and teams, I wondered if I could use my data science knowledge to predict the outcome of these games. I am not talking about a perfect bracket, but one that used team stats to predict games. Could this model beat other people’s brackets and maybe win me a bit of money. As I initially searched the internet for NCAA basketball data, I stumbled upon a Kaggle competition that happens each year. This competition contained all the data I needed (and much more) to train some machine learning models. If you want to check out the site of this competition, it is listed here: https://www.kaggle.com/c/mens-march-mania-2022/