UFC predictions

Usage

• Go to https://ufc-predictions.rajeevwarrier.com/
• Select weight-class of the bout
• Select Number of 5 minute rounds the fight is scheduled for
• Select if the fight is a title fight or not
• Select the fighter names
• Click predict

Details

• Scraped event and fight stats, data from 1993 to present date using Beautiful Soup.
• Cleaned, preprocessed and feature engineered the data to each row being a historical representation of both fighters and their individual fights/fight stats.
• Dataset uploaded and now available on Kaggle at: https://www.kaggle.com/rajeevw/ufcdata
• Oversampled minority class, created and tested predictive models using RandomForestClassifier and XGBoostClassifier
• Created a web app using dash and deployed it with docker on heroku.

Results

• Accuracy (valid): 0.7218
• AUC Score (valid): 0.7763

• 0 corresponds to Blue: Fighter in the blue corner

• 1 corresponds to Red: Fighter in the red corner

• Generally the underdog is in the blue corner and favourite fighter is in the red corner.

• The model is therefore (understandably) having a hard time figuring out when the underdog wins. This is because the sport is very volatile and there can be anything from an injury, psychological loss/trauma to just pure luck that determine the winner.

Details about the data

Context

This is a list of every UFC fight in the history of the organisation. Every row contains information about both fighters, fight details and the winner. The data was scraped from ufcstats website. After fightmetric ceased to exist, this came into picture. I saw that there was a lot of information on the website about every fight and every event and there were no existing ways of capturing all this. I used beautifulsoup to scrape the data and pandas to process it. It was a long and arduous process, please forgive any mistakes. I have provided the raw files incase anybody wants to process it differently. This is my first time creating a dataset, any suggestions and corrections are welcome!

How to use from Scratch?

• From the root i.e. UFC-Predictions, Simply run python -m src.create_ufc_data

(Note: This will scrape everything from the beginning if you haven't used this before. Otherwise the command will update the data files. Then, it will preprocess the raw scraped files to create usable data files)

Content

Each row is a compilation of both fighter stats. Fighters are represented by 'red' and 'blue' (for red and blue corner). So for instance, red fighter has the complied average stats of all the fights except the current one. The stats include damage done by the red fighter on the opponent and the damage done by the opponent on the fighter (represented by 'opp' in the columns) in all the fights this particular red fighter has had, except this one as it has not occured yet (in the data). Same information exists for blue fighter. The target variable is 'Winner' which is the only column that tells you what happened. Here are some column definitions:

Column definitions:

• R_ and B_ prefix signifies red and blue corner fighter stats respectively
• _opp_ containing columns is the average of damage done by the opponent on the fighter
• KD is number of knockdowns
• SIG_STR is no. of significant strikes 'landed of attempted'
• SIG_STR_pct is significant strikes percentage
• TOTAL_STR is total strikes 'landed of attempted'
• TD is no. of takedowns
• TD_pct is takedown percentages
• SUB_ATT is no. of submission attempts
• PASS is no. times the guard was passed?
• REV are the number of reversals
• HEAD is no. of significant strinks to the head 'landed of attempted'
• BODY is no. of significant strikes to the body 'landed of attempted'
• CLINCH is no. of significant strikes in the clinch 'landed of attempted'
• GROUND is no. of significant strikes on the ground 'landed of attempted'
• win_by is method of win
• last_round is last round of the fight (ex. if it was a KO in 1st, then this will be 1)
• last_round_time is when the fight ended in the last round
• Format is the format of the fight (3 rounds, 5 rounds etc.)
• Referee is the name of the Ref
• date is the date of the fight
• location is the location in which the event took place
• Fight_type is which weight class and whether it's a title bout or not
• Winner is the winner of the fight
• Stance is the stance of the fighter (orthodox, southpaw, etc.)
• Height_cms is the height in centimeter
• Reach_cms is the reach of the fighter (arm span) in centimeter
• Weight_lbs is the weight of the fighter in pounds (lbs)
• age is the age of the fighter
• title_bout Boolean value of whether it is title fight or not
• weight_class is which weight class the fight is in (Bantamweight, heavyweight, Women's flyweight, etc.)
• no_of_rounds is the number of rounds the fight was scheduled for
• current_lose_streak is the count of current concurrent losses of the fighter
• current_win_streak is the count of current concurrent wins of the fighter
• draw is the number of draws in the fighter's ufc career
• wins is the number of wins in the fighter's ufc career
• losses is the number of losses in the fighter's ufc career
• total_rounds_fought is the average of total rounds fought by the fighter
• total_time_fought(seconds) is the count of total time spent fighting in seconds
• total_title_bouts is the total number of title bouts taken part in by the fighter
• win_by_Decision_Majority is the number of wins by majority judges decision in the fighter's ufc career
• win_by_Decision_Split is the number of wins by split judges decision in the fighter's ufc career
• win_by_Decision_Unanimous is the number of wins by unanimous judges decision in the fighter's ufc career
• win_by_KO/TKO is the number of wins by knockout in the fighter's ufc career
• win_by_Submission is the number of wins by submission in the fighter's ufc career
• win_by_TKO_Doctor_Stoppage is the number of wins by doctor stoppage in the fighter's ufc career

Acknowledgements

• Inspiration: https://github.com/Hitkul/UFC_Fight_Prediction Provided ideas on how to store per fight data. Unfortunately, the entire UFC website and fightmetric website changed so couldn't reuse any of the code.

• Print Progress Bar: https://gist.github.com/aubricus/f91fb55dc6ba5557fbab06119420dd6a To display progress of how much download is complete in the terminal

• Web app: https://github.com/jasonchanhku/ Ideas on how to use dash and google search api to show fighter images