NHL player Shooting Hand Predictor

Authors: Dominic Lam, Michael Gelfand, Yunke Zhang, Jay Mangat

Demo of a data analysis project for DSCI 522 (Data Science workflows); a course in the Master of Data Science program at the University of British Columbia.

About

This project aims to create a logistic regression model to aid in our analysis of whether a Canadian National Hockey League (NHL) player's height and weight have any bearing on whether their shooting hand is left or right. We used player data from the 1917 season NHL up to the 2023 season NHL season. One's shooting preference is the hand that is lower on the hockey stick so if your left hand is on the top of the stick and your right hand is towards the bottom this is a right handed shot. Based on some exploratory data analysis, there is a overwhelming majority of left handed shooters even though most players are right handed. We trained our model on this data and our final classifier returned a score of 0.51. This follows our hypothesis that a NHL player's height and weight are not strong indicators of their shooting preference.

We obtained the nhl_rosters.csv data set from here. The data set is a part of 2024-01-09 release of tidytuesday, a weekly data science project available on GitHub. Each row represents a single player's information including their height, weight, and shooting preference during any given season with these players repeating over seasons if they were still in the league.

Report

The final report can be found here

Usage

Install this environment as "YOURENV" with:

conda-lock install -n YOURENV conda-lock.yml

Run the analysis root of this repository:

jupyter lab 

Open nhl_shooting_report.ipynb and choose the following python kernal: "Python [conda env:YOURENV]".

Select "Restart Kernel and Run All Cells..." under "Kernel" to ensure all cells are working correctly.

Dependencies

• conda (version 23.9.0 or higher)
• conda-lock (version 2.5.7 or higher)
• jupyterlab (version 4.0.0 or higher)
• nb_conda_kernels (version 2.3.1 or higher)
• Python and packages listed in environment.yml

License

The NHL player Shooting Hand Predictor roject report is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License and the software is licensed under the MIT license. See the license file for more information on either of these licenses. If re-using/re-mixing please provide attribution and link to this webpage.