In plain words: It learns from past player stats which picks lead to the highest-scoring fantasy cricket team, choosing players one at a time. Its teams did better than the usual approach of picking players by hand or with fixed rules.
Abstract
Fantasy sports, particularly fantasy cricket, have garnered immense popularity in India in recent years, offering enthusiasts the opportunity to engage in strategic team-building and compete based on the real-world performance of professional athletes. In this paper, we address the challenge of optimizing fantasy cricket team selection using reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. By framing the team creation process as a sequential decision-making problem, we aim to develop a model that can adaptively select players to maximize the team's potential performance. Our approach leverages historical player data to train RL algorithms, which then predict future performance and optimize team composition. This not only represents a huge business opportunity by enabling more accurate predictions of high-performing teams but also enhances the overall user experience. Through empirical evaluation and comparison with traditional fantasy team drafting methods, we demonstrate the effectiveness of RL in constructing competitive fantasy teams. Our results show that RL-based strategies provide valuable insights into player selection in fantasy sports.
Shamik Bhattacharjee, Kamlesh Marathe, Hitesh Kapoor, Nilesh Patil
arXiv:2412.19215 · cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Dec 26, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 8 Pages including references, Accepted to CODS-COMAD 2024 conference