(Principle Component Analysis, Support Vector Machine)

Predicting the NBA Champions 2024

For our Linear Algebra class final project, two friends and I worked together on a project to predict the 2024 NBA Champions. For context, this project was undertook in November, 2023. To do this, we scraped all team data from 1997 to November 2023 on nba.com. You can check out the data here. We then used PCA to reduce the amount of variables for each team from ten variables to four variables. To make our prediction, we settled on using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. In the process, we decided to use Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to create new synthetic data for championship teams as the ratio of normal teams to championship teams was 30 to 1. The unbalanced ratio led to problems where our model says it is more accurate than it actually is. Our algorithm predicts the Boston Celtics as the 2024 NBA Champions (and we were correct)! ​

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• Principle Component Analysis (PCA)​

• Support Vector Machine (SVM)

• Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE)

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Source code: https://github.com/CapeGenius/NBAChampionPredictor