The Goal
Predict an individuals NHL player's
contribution to his team over the life
of his contract

The Data
• Private stats site (stats.hockeyanalysis.com)
• Rows correspond to individual player's stats by
season
• Data spread across multiple tables
– Joined tables using Pandas with name as key
– Be careful with excel…

Y’s
(EN Goals + EN Assists) / TOI
…for the following season

X’s
• Basic Feature Selection/Manipulation
– Removed redundant/derived
– Removed noisey nonsense
– Normalized for TOI across seasons

Features
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Goals, Assists, First Assists
iFenwick
tFenwick for, tFenwick against
lmFenwick for, lmFenwick against,
HARO/HARD/HART QoC
A few others

More about the data
• Advanced stats only go back to 2007
• Aggregated prior 3 seasons of data to predict
the following season
• Players show up as multiple rows
• Y’s in certain row’s become x’s in other rows

Models
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RF  .326 (be sure to set oob_score = True)
ElasticNetCV  .359
ElasticNetCV w/PCA  .364
RF w/PCA  .285
SVR(xVal)  .314 (could be improved if I
normalized featureset)
• SVR(xVal) w/PCA  .322
• GBR w/PCA  .187

Improvements
• More data!!
– more rows
– Less noise variables (especially Y’s)
• Choose a ‘longer’ Y
• Get age data
• Include injury status