Alright, let’s dive into my little project from yesterday: predicting Venus Williams’ performance. Sounds ambitious, right? Well, I was bored, had some data lying around, and figured, why not?
First things first, I grabbed a bunch of tennis stats. I’m talking about her win/loss record, her opponent’s rankings, surface types (clay, grass, hard court), and even weather conditions from past matches where I could find them. Scraped a few websites, you know the drill. Cleaned the data like crazy because, let’s be honest, raw data is always a mess.
Then I started thinking about what might actually matter. Age is definitely a factor. So I added that in. Maybe her experience on certain surfaces? Check. Head-to-head records against potential opponents? Yup, included that too. It was a real data-puking fiesta at this point.
Next, I tried a few different machine learning models. I’m no expert, but I played around with logistic regression, a simple neural network, and even a random forest. The neural network seemed to give the most promising results, so I focused on that.
The fun part: training the model. I split my data into training and testing sets. Fed the training data to the neural network, tweaked the parameters (learning rate, number of layers, etc.) until it started looking like it was actually learning something. It was mostly trial and error, to be honest.
After training, I tested the model on the unseen data. The accuracy wasn’t amazing – around 65% – but hey, it’s better than flipping a coin! And considering the complexity of tennis matches and the million factors involved, I wasn’t expecting miracles.
So, what did I learn? Well, predicting tennis is HARD. There’s so much that statistics can’t capture. But it was still a fun exercise. I realized that more data, especially psychological factors or real-time data during a match, would probably improve the predictions significantly. Maybe I’ll try to build a better model next time. Who knows?
My conclusion : This was a good way to kill some time and brush up my (very rusty) ML skills.
