SMU Data Science: Project 4

Our Goal

The goal of this project is to create a machine learning model that can predict the winner of the NBA Most Valuable Player award.

Research Questions

The research questions we are trying to answer are:

What statistics have the most impact on MVP voting?
How does previous season performance affect current season MVP voting?
How confident should we be with the results of the model?
How does previous MVP voting affect current year voting?
What position is more likely to win the MVP?
How does League MVP gambling odds impact voting?
Which team generates the most revenue?

Preview of Our Datasets

As seen in our GitHub Repository, we have approximately 12 datasets in CSV format. The column names vary slightly per each dataset, but they all follow a similair structure.

	Season	Player	Pos	Age	G	MP	PTS	AST	TRB	STL	BLK	FG%	eFG%	FT%	PF	WS	WS/48	MVP
0	1996-97	Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf	PG	27	75	28.4	13.7	2.5	1.6	0.7	0.1	0.445	0.496	0.846	2.3	2.7	0.06
1	1996-97	Shareef Abdur-Rahim	PF	20	80	35.0	18.7	2.2	6.9	1.0	1.0	0.453	0.456	0.746	2.5	2.9	0.049
3	1996-97	Cory Alexander	PG	23	80	18.2	7.2	3.2	1.5	1.0	0.2	0.396	0.492	0.736	1.9	1.1	0.035
7	1996-97	Ray Allen	SG	21	82	30.9	13.4	2.6	4.0	0.9	0.1	0.43	0.494	0.823	2.7	4.9	0.092
11	1996-97	Kenny Anderson	PG	26	82	37.6	17.5	7.1	4.4	2.0	0.2	0.427	0.485	0.768	2.7	12.4	0.193
12	1996-97	Nick Anderson	SG	29	63	34.3	12.0	2.9	4.8	1.9	0.5	0.397	0.496	0.404	2.5	4.2	0.093
13	1996-97	Shandon Anderson	SG	23	65	16.4	5.9	0.8	2.8	0.4	0.1	0.462	0.5	0.687	1.7	1.2	0.056
15	1996-97	Greg Anthony	PG	29	65	28.7	9.5	6.3	2.8	2.0	0.1	0.393	0.479	0.73	1.9	3.5	0.09
16	1996-97	B.J. Armstrong	PG	29	49	20.8	7.9	2.6	1.5	0.5	0.0	0.453	0.491	0.861	1.1	1.3	0.061
17	1996-97	Darrell Armstrong	PG	28	67	15.1	6.1	2.6	1.1	0.9	0.1	0.383	0.462	0.868	1.7	1.8	0.085
18	1996-97	Vincent Askew	SG	30	43	19.5	5.6	2.1	2.3	0.4	0.1	0.435	0.454	0.795	2.9	1.5	0.086
26	1996-97	Isaac Austin	C	27	82	22.9	9.7	1.2	5.8	0.5	0.5	0.502	0.502	0.664	3.0	4.0	0.102