March Machine Learning Madness!

Mid-march in the USA means millions of people watching, and betting on, college basketball (I live here but I didn’t make the rules). As the NCAA college championship continues I wanted to briefly highlight the work of Wesley Pasfield one of our Professional Services Machine Learning Specialists. Wesley was able to take data from kenpom.com and College Basketball Reference to build a model predicting the outcome of March Madness using the Amazon SageMaker built-in XGBoost algorithm.

Wesley walks us through grabbing the data, performing an exploratory data analysis (EDA in the data science lingo), reshaping the data for the xgboost algorithm, using the SageMaker SDK to create a training job for two different models, and finally creating a SageMaker inference endpoint for serving predictions at https://cbbpredictions.com/. Check out part one of the post and part two.

Pretty cool right? Why not open the notebook and give the xgboost algorithm a try? Just know that there are a few caveats to the predictions so don’t go making your champion prediction just yet!

– Randall