Predicting Optimal Cricket Team using Data Analysis

Cricket has always been an integral part of the Indian culture. In India, Cricket is a religion followed by close to 1 billion hardcore cricket fans. Team selection plays one of the most important roles in deciding the outcome of a match. There are various factors that affect the performances of players including form, venue, previous records. Generally, fifteen or sixteen players form a cricket squad. A squad contains different players whose expertise range from batting, bowling, and wicket keeping. The squad needs to be well balanced in its construction for it to play to its maximum potential. Taking into consideration all these factors, deciding you're playing 11 is easier said than done. A human selection committee will invariably suffer from the shortcomings of unfair and biased judgment, human error, and overlooking of certain important aspects. Here's where data science and optimization come into the picture. Data Science is a growing field that is playing a pivotal role in many fields and cricket is no exception. Cricket is a sport which can be associated with a lot of data parameters due to the nature of the game. The insights that one can get from this data can provide people with a lot of information which in turn can help them make decisions. This data can be processed to get key information about the parameters that affect the selection process. In this project we are considering around 35 parameters that affect the player performances which in turn will help to build an optimized squad to maximize the performance of individuals.