Sports Performance Analytics Specialization

Sports analytics has emerged as a field of research with increasing popularity propelled, in part, by the real-world success illustrated by the best-selling book and motion picture, Moneyball. Analysis of team and player performance data has continued to revolutionize the sports industry on the field, court, and ice as well as in living rooms among fantasy sports players and online sports gambling.
Drawing from real data sets in Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Hockey League (NHL), the English Premier League (EPL-soccer), and the Indian Premier League (IPL-cricket), you’ll learn how to construct predictive models to anticipate team and player performance. You’ll also replicate the success of Moneyball using real statistical models, use the Linear Probability Model (LPM) to anticipate categorical outcomes variables in sports contests, explore how teams collect and organize an athlete’s performance data with wearable technologies, and how to apply machine learning in a sports analytics context.
This introduction to the field of sports analytics is designed for sports managers, coaches, physical therapists, as well as sports fans who want to understand the science behind athlete performance and game prediction. New Python programmers and data analysts who are looking for a fun and practical way to apply their Python, statistics, or predictive modeling skills will enjoy exploring courses in this series.

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Introduction to Machine Learning in Sports Analytics (Coursera)

In this course students will explore supervised machine learning techniques using the python scikit learn (sklearn) toolkit and real-world athletic data to understand both machine learning algorithms and how to predict athletic outcomes. Building on the previous courses in the specialization, students will apply methods such as support vector [...]

Wearable Technologies and Sports Analytics (Coursera)

Sports analytics now include massive datasets from athletes and teams that quantify both training and competition efforts. Wearable technology devices are being worn by athletes everyday and provide considerable opportunities for an in-depth look at the stress and recovery of athletes across entire seasons. The capturing of [...]

Moneyball and Beyond (Coursera)

The book Moneyball triggered a revolution in the analysis of performance statistics in professional sports, by showing that data analytics could be used to increase team winning percentage. This course shows how to program data using Python to test the claims that lie behind the Moneyball story, and to [...]

Foundations of Sports Analytics: Data, Representation, and Models in Sports (Coursera)

This course provides an introduction to using Python to analyze team performance in sports. Learners will discover a variety of techniques that can be used to represent sports data and how to extract narratives based on these analytical techniques. The main focus of the introduction will be on the [...]

Prediction Models with Sports Data (Coursera)

In this course the learner will be shown how to generate forecasts of game results in professional sports using Python. The main emphasis of the course is on teaching the method of logistic regression as a way of modeling game results, using data on team expenditures. The learner is [...]