Talking Tech Featured Talking Tech: Analyzing Feature Importance in Neural Networks Probably the biggest issue I come across working with artificial neural networks is that they are a bit of a black box.
Programming Featured Getting Started with CFB Analytics The 2022 season is about to be upon us and you are looking to get into CFB analytics of your own, like creating your own poll or picks simulator. Or maybe you've largely used spreadsheets and are looking to graduate to something that gives more capabilities and flexibility. Perhaps you've
Talking Tech Featured Talking Tech: Building an Artifical Neural Network to Predict Games In this edition of Talking Tech, we're going to be diving into some machine learning. Specifically, we're going to be looking at my preferred method for building predictive models for just about anything: the artificial neural networks, or ANN for short. The name may sound intimidating, but ANNs aren't really
Talking Tech Featured Talking Tech: Calculating Elo Ratings for College Football Back in the early days of this blog, we walked through the process of building a Simple Rating System to rank teams [https://blog.collegefootballdata.com/talking-tech-bu/], also known as SRS. SRS has a lot of benefits, such as providing a good relativistic rating of teams since it is based
Talking Tech Featured Talking Tech: Creating Geo Charts In this guide, we'll walkthrough how to create geo charts using the Cartopy and Matplotlib libraries in conjunction with the CFBD Python library, taking advantage of CFBD's recruit and player location data.
Programming Featured Using API Keys with the CFBD API Key authentication is now being enforced for all requests make to the CFBD API. This guide will walk through how to authenticate across several different programming languages.
Announcement Featured API keys are now available! The API will start requiring API key authorization starting April 1st. Here's what you need to know.
Talking Tech Featured Talking Tech: Calculating SRS (Pandemic Edition) You might wonder, why is it so difficult to calculate some of these metrics? We have games and data, right? While that may be true, there are several factors that serve to complicate things this season.
Programming Featured Making charts with Plotly and the CFBD Python library It's been awhile since I've done one of these. If you're familiar with my Talking Tech series, this entry will be much shorter. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen that the official CFBD Python client library dropped this past weekend. > Introducing the official CFBD Python client
Talking Tech Featured Talking Tech: Predicting Play Calls Using a Random Forest Classifier Welcome back to Talking Tech! It's been awhile since our last post. To catch everyone up with where we've been thus far, we first went through setting up an environment for data science [https://blog.collegefootballdata.com/talking-tech-building-an-environment-for-predictive-analysis/] using Docker and Project Jupyter. When then went over creating a Simple
By The Numbers By The Numbers: Previewing the National Championship Game Welcome to By The Numbers, a series in which I plan to preview upcoming games using numerical analysis. I hope to make this a regular feature starting next year. Since there are innumerable games to cover in a given year and only one of me, I am looking for people
Analysis Featured Talking Tech: Charting Data with Plotly In the last edition of Talking Tech, we created our own rating system [https://blog.collegefootballdata.com/talking-tech-bu/] using an SRS algorithm. We're going to build off of that work to demonstrate how to plot charts in Python using Jupyter notebooks. Before we get started, we need to find a
Talking Tech Featured Talking Tech: Creating a Simple Rating System Welcome back! We didn't get to have much fun last time, as we were mostly concerned with setting up an environment for data analytics in Python [https://blog.collegefootballdata.com/talking-tech-building-an-environment-for-predictive-analysis/] . A few people even offered feedback on different tools and setups they use, which is fantastic. Just as there's
Programming Featured Talking Tech: Building an environment for data analysis Welcome to the first edition of Talking Tech! This series is going to be a deeper dive into the weeds of predictive analysis. It will be geared more towards coders and less towards data scientists. In other words, expect to see more code in this series rather than mathematical jargon.
Introducing the CFBD Blog... I'm not quite sure how to begin this initial post. Creating an outlet like this has been on my radar for some time now. Well, it's been on my radar for the past year and a half at the very least. Since starting CollegeFootballData.com, I've always envisioned a place