Outs Above Average for Shortstops

Overview

According to the Statcast, Outs Above Average (OAA) is a range-based metric of skill that shows how many outs a player has saved. For example, a fielder who catches a 25% catch probability play gets +0.75; one who fails to make the play gets -0.25. Prior to 2020, OAA was an outfield-only metric. OAA is calculated differently for outfielders and infielders. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to develop a framework which is capable of estimating out probability for each in-play ground ball first fielded by shortstop and further calculating OAA for each shortstop. This project is basically composed of four parts as follows:

1. Feature engineering
2. Model building (k-NN, random forest, and XGBoost) and parameter tuning (cross validation and grid search)
3. Probability calibration (Platt scaling and isotonic regression)
4. Model evaluation (overall accuracy, confusion matrix, and reliability diagram)

Link to the Project

1. https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/KUANCHENGFU/Outs-Above-Average-for-Shortstops/blob/main/Outs_above_average_for_shortstops.ipynb