Spotfire Lands TIBCO in the 99th Percentile for March Tournament Brackets
Blog: The Tibco Blog
The country’s most exciting college basketball tournament of the year has come to an end, and TIBCO pulled out a win once again. For the second year in a row, the TIBCO Data Science team landed in the 99th percentile with its forecasted bracket, including predicting the tournament champion, Virginia.
But how did they do it? With the help of predictive analytics tools TIBCO Data Science® and TIBCO Spotfire®. The two solutions are integrated to create a seamless data analysis experience. TIBCO Data Science finds and extracts data patterns, while the Spotfire platform delivers self-service analytics for everyone and works with all kinds of data, including historical sports data. By relying on the power of data science, TIBCO was in the top one percent of more than 70 million tournament brackets. Here’s how:
First, we had to provide Spotfire with data upon which it could build a model. We put historical public data sets for past teams into TIBCO Data Science, with statistics like offensive efficiency, rebounds, turnovers, points per game, and three-point shots. The platform took those data points and decided which were the most relevant for each team, based on game wins. The topmost relevant data points were then used to create an algorithm.
Next, we had to test our model. We ran our algorithm on the historical data, to see if we could ‘predict’ the outcomes that in actuality had already happened. When the predictions lined up with the true outcomes, we knew we had an accurate machine learning model.
Finally, when the full tournament lineup was announced on March 17, historical data for each of the 68 participating teams were put into Spotfire, and the model was run for each initial match-up followed by the predicted winners of each round.
Those predictions panned out, as TIBCO employees, as well as those who attended our Metrics of Data Madness happy hour and webinar, can attest: they have TIBCO to thank for the cash in their pockets from winning their own personal bracket pool.
Data science can give you a leg up in your bracket predictions—just think what it can do for your business. To learn more about how you can leverage TIBCO Spotfire on the court and in the office, download a free trial today. Make sure to check back in next March to get in on the action before the tournament begins, so that you can be the winner of your office pool.
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