Your verification ID is: guDlT7MCuIOFFHSbB3jPFN5QLaQ Big Computing: Predicting Injuries to NFL Players for Fantasy Football

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Predicting Injuries to NFL Players for Fantasy Football

With the number of people using player predictions for fantasy football I was surprised to find that few if any of these predictions include a factor for the  chance an NFL player gets injured. This is a critical factor in the decision process because a less durable player can cost you a week if he is injured in a game or a season if you draft a guy and he is out for the season. I have always found the NFL is the hardest to predict of the professional sports in the US because of the short season and limited number of events in each game. Basically it because for me a rare event problem. I wondered if anyone had looked at this and come up with a solution. I learned long ago as a R programmer that if you wanted to do something always look to see if someone had already build a package for it because they usually had. The are a few companies that have in fact worked on this problem and are selling their results to interested parties. On such company is Sports Injury Predictor, They claim a 60% accuracy rate in prediction but the do not define that in terms of time period in which it is accurate or it potential impact on fantasy team result which is actually the outcome we are concerned with.

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