Winter 2025
Show 'n Tell
April 3rd, 2025
Check out what folks in the community are working on! Includes a paper on operational research in football, a Waterloo Warriors Baseball Dashboard, an NHL Rivalries Presentation and some research on the art of the stolen base.
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Sports Data Visualizations
March 20th, 2025
Do you like to ogle at colorful representations of mundane numbers? Join Shamar in this talk as he breaks down various data visualization techniques across applications in college football, hockey, soccer, mixed martial arts and basketball.
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Chess Valuations
March 6th, 2025
Join Professor Davis in a discussion about the various chess valuations methods. Whether you're a grandmaster with an arsenal of openings or you can't tell a knight and bishop apart, listen in to see how your statistics class influences the greatest chess engines of our time.
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Computer Vision & Baseball: BaseballCV
Feb 20th, 2025
Join Dylan Drummey's discussion exploring Baseball CV, a bat-breaking software package with countless datasets and tools. pip, install, hooray!
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Computer Vision & Baseball: BaseballCV
Feb 20th, 2025
Join Dylan Drummey's discussion exploring Baseball CV, a bat-breaking software package with countless datasets and tools. pip, install, hooray!
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Peter L'Oiseau Guest Presentation: Data Scientist @ Toronto Blue Jays
Feb 6th, 2025
Bautista with a drive, deep left field......no doubt about it!!!! In this session, we have a Peter L'Oiseau walk us through the data that drives the biggest swings for Canada's favourite team.
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Fantasy Correlation
Jan 23, 2025
Lookin' for the inside scoop to win your next fantasy league? Check out this talk by Professor Davis, where he utilizes Yahoo Sports MLB Data to estimate fantasy performance of MLB teammates.
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Poker Rathole Talk
Jan 9, 2025
Feeling risky? Join us as we go "ALL IN" into the statistics behind the world's favourite card game.
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Fall 2024
Plus-Minus Models: An Analysis
Nov 21, 2024
Plus-Minus is one of the most polarizing player metrics in the sporting world. Join David Awosoga in a thorough discussion of Plus-Minus Models and its applications in various sports/games.
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Manim: An Animation Library
Nov 7, 2024
Ever wonder how 3Blue1Brown makes the stunning animations that captures the eyes of millions of students? In this session, Professor Davis will walk you through the ins-and-outs of this open source project and potential use cases!
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David Radke: Presenting Multi-Agent Challenges in Team Sports Analytics
Oct 24, 2024
David Radke is a Senior Research Scientist with the Chicago Blackhawks. David completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and was a member of UWaterloo's Mens Ice Hockey Team. In this session, he discusses the applications of AI, multi-agent systems and reinforcement learning in the NHL.
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The State of the Sports Industry
Oct 10, 2024
Interested in working in Sports Analytics? Don't know where to start? Check out this informative talk to learn more about what skills are in-demand in the job market and what you can do to stand out!
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Starcraft Regression
Sept 26, 2024
In this session, we apply statistical techniques like classification trees, confusion matrices and random forests to Starcraft.
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Grammar of Tables
Sept 12, 2024
Join us for an engaging lecture on the "Grammar of Tables," where we delve into the principles of designing clear and effective tables. Discover the foundational concepts that govern table layout and data presentation, and learn how to apply these principles to enhance readability and impact.
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Spring 2024
Spring Term Show and Tell
August 1, 2024
The Show and Tell session is an exciting opportunity for students to showcase their data analytics projects developed over the term. This event serves as a platform for sharing insights, discoveries, and innovations derived from applying analytical techniques to real-world data sets.
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Bayesian Modelling of Horse Racing Outcomes
July 18, 2024
Bayesian Modelling of Horse Racing Outcomes explores the application of Bayesian statistics in predicting and analyzing the results of horse races. This sophisticated approach leverages probabilistic reasoning to model various factors influencing race outcomes, such as horse performance metrics, jockey statistics, track conditions, and historical data.
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Introduction to E-Sports Analytics
June 27, 2024
In the burgeoning field of e-sports analytics, understanding how to acquire and format data from various games is crucial for extracting meaningful insights. This introduction will walk through the steps involved in acquiring and formatting data specifically from three popular e-sports: League of Legends (LoL), StarCraft 2 (SC2), and Chess.
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Data Visualization of Sports Data
June 13, 2024
Effective sports data visualization hinges on creating graphs that are not only intuitive but also contextual, providing clear insights into complex athletic dynamics. Achieving this goal necessitates the strategic use of graph components and layers tailored to the specific nuances of sports data.
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Soccer Analytics Within Industry
May 30, 2024
In the realm of soccer analytics, accessing and analyzing comprehensive datasets is crucial for gaining insights into player performance, team strategies, and market trends. This exploration focuses on datasets available from prominent sources such as worldfootballR, FBref, Transfermarkt, and Understat, each providing unique perspectives and layers of data essential for in-depth analysis.
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Monte Carlo Simulation in Cricket
May 16, 2024
Complex events are composed of simple events. Finding a closed form solution for a complex event is impractical or very hard. Instead, we use Monte Carlo simulations. This involves finding the probabilities of small events then generating the results of the complex event and record. The latter step is repeated thousands of times to get the proportion of times the criterion is met and/or the complex event happened. An example of the simulation is demonstrated using a cricket data set.
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Winter 2024
Winter Term Show and Tell
April 9, 2024
The Show and Tell session is an exciting opportunity for students to showcase their data analytics projects developed over the term. This event serves as a platform for sharing insights, discoveries, and innovations derived from applying analytical techniques to real-world data sets.
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Continuous Win Probability Modeling in Lacrosse
March 19, 2024
Walkthrough the steps of modeling the continuous win probability in lacrosse starting with data acquisition followed by data cleaning. A team agnostic and poisson model will be explored.
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Data Acquisition Techniques
March 5, 2024
Without data, there is no analytics. While we could collect data on our own, that would be extremely time consuming and expensive. Instead, we can access data that is publicly available using one of two methods. The first is through the use of API's which allow us to access information stored in databases. The second is through web scraping which involves obtaining data indirectly through websites.
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Working with Player Tracking Data
February 6, 2024
Get hands on experience working with data. This session includes an overview and starter code for the 2024 Big Data Cup.
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Rating Systems
January 23, 2024
How exactly do we rank competitors? It can be very straightforward if all opponents face each other the same amount of times. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many games and sports. Methods such as the Elo, Glicko, and Trueskill are explored.
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Fall 2023
How to Finish a Sports Analytics Project
November 23, 2023
Congratulations! You've completed the process of starting a sports analytics project. Now comes the fun part; finishing one. Learn about the various deliverable options such as blog posts, posters, industry papers, and more. Bring your data to life with insightful visualizations and share them with others for reproducability.
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How to Start a Sports Analytics Project
November 9, 2023
Starting a sports analytics project involves following the PPDAC framework: Problem, Plan, Data, Analysis, and Conclusion. This structured approach guides enthusiasts and professionals alike in leveraging data to gain insights into athletic performance, strategy, and management.
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Inaugural Session
October 26, 2023
Introducing our brand new club, University of Waterloo Analytics Group for Games and Sports. Learn about what sports analytics entails, why it is important, and how we conduct analytics. We have outlined four main goals for the club including forming teams to collaborate, sharing educational resources, attending seminars, and presenting research at conferences.
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