As someone who is passionate about both sports and data science, sports prediction has been an obvious passion of mine. After completing an Intro to Machine Learning course during my sophomore year at UT Dallas, I used my newly discovered skills in data science competitions hosted by Kaggle. The first competition I competed in was around predicting the outcome of each match in the Men's March Madness 2018 competition. Using a combination of machine learning models and feature engineering techniques, my algorithm's results placed in the top 1% of all brackets worldwide and I correctly predicted the tournament's winning team, Villanova. In 2019, I developed a new algorithm whose results placed in the top 3% of all brackets worldwide and again correctly predicted the winning team, Virginia.
