• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.263-286
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• 2022

This study acquires NBA statistical information for a total of 32 years from 1990 to 2022 using web crawling, observes variables of interest through exploratory data analysis, and generates related derived variables. Unused variables were removed through a purification process on the input data, and correlation analysis, t-test, and ANOVA were performed on the remaining variables. For the variable of interest, the difference in the mean between the groups that advanced to the playoffs and did not advance to the playoffs was tested, and then to compensate for this, the average difference between the three groups (higher/middle/lower) based on ranking was reconfirmed. Of the input data, only this year's season data was used as a test set, and 5-fold cross-validation was performed by dividing the training set and the validation set for model training. The overfitting problem was solved by comparing the cross-validation result and the final analysis result using the test set to confirm that there was no difference in the performance matrix. Because the quality level of the raw data is high and the statistical assumptions are satisfied, most of the models showed good results despite the small data set. This study not only predicts NBA game results or classifies whether or not to advance to the playoffs using machine learning, but also examines whether the variables of interest are included in the major variables with high importance by understanding the importance of input attribute. Through the visualization of SHAP value, it was possible to overcome the limitation that could not be interpreted only with the result of feature importance, and to compensate for the lack of consistency in the importance calculation in the process of entering/removing variables. It was found that a number of variables related to three points and errors classified as subjects of interest in this study were included in the major variables affecting advancing to the playoffs in the NBA. Although this study is similar in that it includes topics such as match results, playoffs, and championship predictions, which have been dealt with in the existing sports data analysis field, and comparatively analyzed several machine learning models for analysis, there is a difference in that the interest features are set in advance and statistically verified, so that it is compared with the machine learning analysis result. Also, it was differentiated from existing studies by presenting explanatory visualization results using SHAP, one of the XAI models.