SYSTEM TESTING - Fantasy Football (Can you beat a robot?)

[lunatism]

Hey guys, It's definitely been forever since I last posted on here, hopefully I can start making regular contributions again! Introduction What I'm doing at the moment requires a bit of forum-input, so fingers-crossed that you lot will be up for this. I've been doing some research about how to judge players influence on a match, but in a quantifiable way that could be collected, analysed, measured and read through objective reading glasses. I picked the Premier League as the one to test, as it's the one I'm the most familiar with (probably the same for majority of users on here). What I've done so far For the last few days, I've been running gazillions of web queries to scrape down player data for this season. It has taken hours and hours (and it was all automated - just a long process). And at this stage, I have the data for the whole of the 2013/14 season. Perfect, right? Well, normally, as some of you might remember, when I'm back-testing, I tend to try and go a decade into the past, considering thousands of instances of an action before I'd call it a pattern and build a system around it, but this is different. It would be impossible for me to run tests going *that* far back into the past, so I've decided instead to run a few public tests to see how this all works out. So what the hell is this project? Well, if you haven't guessed already, I'm basically generating figures to represent each player in each team, based on their contributions throughout the season. Now this is nothing at all like the kind of info that you would find on WhoScored (which is a pretty amazing site), that would involve a lot more work and research and I want to test it out on a small scale first. At this stage, each player is given a figure that would represent what they have done in the season, and then, I would use these figures to manually create a Fantasy Football team that fit (more or less) the Barclaycard Fantasy Football rules. Ultimately, I would plan to use these player figures to predict what will happen in a given match (so it would be a good tool in the betting portfolio), but at this early stage in development, I thought it would be more "fun" and a more than worthwhile activity to try to use the data to create fantasy football teams for the weekend games in the Premier League. After all, picking the right players for fantasy football ALSO can win people cash...but let's be clear, this is about 1) proof of concept and 2) having fun. As long as this project is fun for me, I'll not mind if the FF team stinks! How can you help me? Simple, i'll post up the rules for the game, and all I need you to do is download the Excel Spreadsheet and choose a team of 11 players following the rules. I'm not interested in larger squads with substitutes at this stage, I just want to see how a team aided by the figures that i've generated would fare against the collective genius that is Punters Lounge. It is totally acceptable to 100% recycle your team every week, the ultimate question would be if you can be the computer-aided team or not. What is in the spreadsheet? In the spreadsheet you will find the following for each player: TEAM NAME POSITION (this is their preferred/regular position...you won't see Carrick as a Centre-Back) AGE GAMES PLAYED MINUTES PLAYED GOALS ASSISTS YELLOWS 2 YELLOWS STRAIGHT REDS NATIONALITY FOOT (if known) VALUE (if known) I have assigned two different values to each player, the value that they are currently listed at on TransferMarkt and the "likely" value to be assigned by the Barclaycard FF (which is approximately the actual current value divided by 2.5 in most cases). These values are just there for the purposes of team construction (so that there can be a maximum spend). The spreadsheet has pretty much every single Premier League player from this season (my apologies if somebody has been missed), and the data is just related to their performances in the Premier League, not cups or friendlies. Just thought to add, there will also be a "random" team submitted too. This team will be the first random collection of players that fits the maximum limit for player spending while covering every position in a 4-4-2. We'll call this team the Jokers. If you get less points than The Jokers, you might as well not bother! But it would be an interesting side-experiment, so see how many points a random team selector could get compared to all your bright minds and a computer-aided team. Secrecy??? Now, I really don't want to ruin the "authenticity" of this project by publishing my team in this thread at such an early stage, and so I would propose the following (alternative suggestions welcome), that between now and the first weekend kick-off (which is 1245 Man Utd vs. West Ham for this weekend) anybody can message me a team (which follows the submission steps below), and then after that one hour cut-off, I post a spreadsheet (or just a post) containing all the teams that have been sent to me (including my own team). That way, nobody is influenced by my pc-aided selections. Sound fair? Team Submission To make things simple and much easier to compare side-by-side, i'd want all the formations to be 4-4-2. So you would message me with your squad from 1>11, the total cost of your team (ensuring it is within the limit in the rules) and I would record that in spreadsheet to be posted later.It's DEFINITELY acceptable to just input you personal FF team, all i want from you is data so that I can run comparisons. I want to see a © for you captain and a (v) for vice captain. For example: GK - Kelvin Davis LB - Javier Garrido RB - Steven Whittaker CB - Mark Hudson CB - © James Okore LM - (v) Yala Bolasie RM - Ashkan Dejagah CM - Barry Bannan CM - Ravel Morrison ST - Cameron Jerome ST - Ricky van Wolfswinkel VALUE = £###,###,### USER = loooosertism METHOD OF SELECTION = *** it would be FANTASTIC if you briefly were able to explain how you selected your team, simple gut instinct, favourite players, teams, etc - no wrong answers here Results I'll post up the results after each game week would be finished, and i'd try to post an updated player spreadsheet each Thursday. Obviously this would be skipping the midweek fixtures. Going Forward If these works ok (interest-wise), i plan to run this at least until the end of the season, if not into the seasons that follow, and i'd definitely be interested in sharing my player figures on the site on a weekly basis to help people with their FF teams or just betting in general......got to see if it works first though!! SO..... At this stage, this is just an idea that I'd like to test out, if there are any questions, get them to me, i'll try and respond as quickly as I can. I've attached a sample spreadsheet with data for Crystal Palace and the rules. As I mentioned before, all the data is sourced from the internet so if you spot an error, let me know. REMEMBER - this is about fun and science (the science part is seeing if you can beat a computer, the fun is laughing when you realise [ATTACH]5823[/ATTACH] As soon as there are a few interested parties, i'll upload the main sheet and we can get to duelling :cigar

[muppet77]

Re: SYSTEM TESTING - Fantasy Football (Can you beat a robot?) Just an idea, but can we help to scrape previous seasons to bolster the model? I am sure you could get 10-20 helpers to run pcs for you?