Auto-play: A Data Mining Approach to ODI Cricket Simulation and Prediction

Cricket is a popular sport played by 16 countries, is the second most watched sport in the world after soccer, and enjoys a multi-million dollar industry. There is tremendous interest in simulating cricket and more importantly in predicting the outcome of games, particularly in their one-day international format. The complex rules governing the game, along with the numerous natural parameters affecting the outcome of a cricket match present significant challenges for accurate prediction. Multiple diverse parameters, including but not limited to cricketing skills and performances, match venues and even weather conditions can significantly affect the outcome of a game. The sheer number of parameters, along with their interdependence and variance create a non-trivial challenge to create an accurate quantitative model of a game. Unlike other sports such as basketball and baseball which are well researched from a sports analytics perspective, for cricket, these tasks have yet to be investigated in depth. In this paper, we build a prediction system that takes in historical match data as well as the instantaneous state of a match, and predicts future match events culminating in a victory or loss. We model the game using a subset of match parameters, using a combination of linear regression and nearest-neighbor clustering algorithms. We describe our model and algorithms and finally present quantitative results, demonstrating the performance of our algorithms in predicting the number of runs scored, one of the most important determinants of match outcome.