Sports Data and R – Scope for a Thematic (Rather than Task) View? (Living Post)

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Via my feeds, I noticed a package announcement today for cricketR!, a new package for analysing cricket performance data.

This got me wondering (again!) about what other sports related packages there might be out there, either in terms of functional thematic packages (to do with sport in general, or one sport in particular), or particular data packages, that either bundle up sports related data sets, or provide and API (that is, a wrapper for an official API, or a wrapper for a scraper that extracts data from one or more websites in a slightly scruffier way!)

This is just a first quick attempt, an unstructured listing that may also include data sets that are more generic than R-specific (eg CSV datafiles, or SQL database exports). I’ll try to keep this post updated as I find/hear about more packages, and also work a bit more on structuring it a little better. I really should pist this as a wiki somewhere – or perhaps curate something on Github?

  • generic:
    • SportsAnalytics [CRAN]: “infrastructure for sports analysis. Anyway, currently it is a selection of data sets, functions to fetch sports data, examples, and demos”.
  • athletics:
    • olympic {ade4} [Inside-R packages]: “performances of 33 men’s decathlon at the Olympic Games (1988)”.
  • baseball:
  • basketball:
  • cricket:
  • football (soccer):
    • engsoccerdata [Github]: “a repository for complete soccer datasets, along with some built-in functions for analyzing parts of the data. Currently I include three English ones (League data, FA Cup data, Playoff data – described below) and some European leagues (Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland). Updates in the near future will include those for various other European leagues as well as MLS.”. Citation: James P. Curley (2015). engsoccerdata: English Soccer Data 1871-2015. R package version 0.1.4
    • UKSoccer {vcd} [Inside-R packages]: data “on the goals scored by Home and Away teams in the Premier Football League, 1995/6 season.”.
    • Soccer {PASWR} [Inside-R packages]: “how many goals were scored in the regulation 90 minute periods of World Cup soccer matches from 1990 to 2002″.
  • golf:
  • gymnastics:
  • motor sport:
  • snooker:
  • swimming:
  • tennis:
    • tennis_MatchChartingProject: “The goal of the Match Charting Project (MCP) is to amass detailed records of professional matches.”.

It would perhaps make more sense to try to collect rather more structured (meta)data for each package. For example: homepage, sport/discipline; analysis, data (package or API), or analysis and data; if data: year-range, source, data coverage (e.g. table column headings); if analysis, brief synopsis of tools available (e.g. chart generators).

If you know of any others, please let me know via the comments and I’ll try to keep this page updated with a reasonably current list.

As well as packages, here are some links to blog posts that look at sports data analysis using R:

Again, if you can recommend further posts, please let me know via the comments.


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