Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through my experience messing around with a little tennis match prediction: Michelsen vs. Giron. Honestly, I just wanted to see if I could make some sort of guess based on readily available data.
First thing I did was to scrape some data. I hit up a couple of tennis stats websites – you know, the usual suspects. I needed match history, player rankings, that kinda stuff. It was a bit of a pain, honestly. Different sites had different formats, so I had to write some custom scripts to clean and structure everything. I’m talking Python with Beautiful Soup, the usual suspects.
Once I had the data, I needed to figure out what to actually use. I figured the most important stuff would be:
- Player Rankings: Obvious, right?
- Recent Match Results: How have they been playing lately? Wins and losses, duh.
- Head-to-Head Record: Have they played each other before? Who usually wins?
- Surface Preference: Are they better on clay, hard courts, or grass? This match was on hard court, so I gave that extra weight.
Then came the fun part – trying to actually predict the damn thing. I’m no data scientist, so I kept it simple. I basically assigned weights to each of those factors I mentioned. Like, ranking might be 40%, recent form 30%, head-to-head 15%, surface 15%. Just pulled those numbers out of my butt, honestly.
Next, I calculated a “score” for each player based on these weighted factors. So, for example, if Michelsen was ranked higher, he’d get more points for that category. If Giron had won their last encounter, he’d get more points there, and so on.
Finally, I just compared their scores. Whoever had the higher score was my “predicted” winner. Pretty basic stuff, I know.
So, what happened? Well, my super-sophisticated prediction machine said Michelsen was gonna win. And guess what? He did! Now, I’m not saying I’m some kind of tennis oracle, but it was pretty cool to see it actually work out.
Of course, there are a million things I could have done better. More data, better weighting, maybe even try some actual machine learning stuff. But for a quick little project, it was a fun way to spend an afternoon. Plus, it made watching the match a little more interesting. Next time, I’ll try to add some features!
