Analysis and Prediction of Fantasy Cricket Contest Winners Using Machine Learning Techniques

Cricket is one of the well-known sports across the world. The increasing interest of cricket in recent years resulted in different forms like T20, T10 from test and one day format. The craze of all these formats of cricket matches today has come into online fantasy cricket league games. Dream11 is one such app that is most popular in this context, along with many similar apps. Creating a dream team of 11 players from playing 11 of both teams involves skills, ideas and luck. Predicting a winner among all the joined contestants based on the previous historical data is a challenging task. In this paper, we used a feed-forward deep neural network (DNN) classifier for predicting the winning contestant for the top three positions in a fantasy league cricket contest. The performance of the DNN approach was compared against that of state-of-the-art machine learning approaches like k-nearest neighbours (KNN), logistic regression (LR), Naive Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), support vector machines (SVM) and in predicting the fantasy cricket contest winners. Among the methods used, DNN showed the best results for all three positions, showing its consistency in predicting the winners and outperforms the state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers by 13%, 8% and 9%, respectively, for first, second and third winning positions, respectively.