Predicting winners in the NCAA Basketball Tournament
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Abstract
Every year, the NCAA basketball tournament, known as “March Madness,” has 68 of the best college basketball teams in the country face off in a single-elimination tournament to crown a champion. Significant work has been devoted to the development of models to accurately predict the winner in any head-to-head matchup. In 2014, the website Kaggle created a competition that had teams of people trying to create a model and accurately predict the 2014 tournament. Most submissions had a higher accuracy rate than the average person, but nobody came close to a perfect bracket. In this report, I use data from the 2014 Kaggle competition and recent advances in statistical methodology to determine the best models for predicting winners of head-to-head matchups. I then compare my results to those from the best submissions from the Kaggle competition.