Predictive Modeling in Sports Leagues : An Application in Indian Premier League

The purpose of this article is to develop models that can help team selectors build talented teams with minimum possible spending. In this study, we build several predictive models for predicting the selection of a player in the Indian Premier League, a cricket league, based on each player’s past performance. The models are developed using SAS® Enterprise Miner™ 7.1. The best-performing model in the study is selected based on the validation data misclassification rate. The selected model provides us with the probability measure of the selection of each player, which can be used as a valuation factor in the bidding equation. The models that are developed can help decision makers during auction set salaries for the players