Using Social Networks to Improve Group Transition Prediction in Professional Sports

Abstract: We examine whether social data can be used to predict how members of Major League Baseball (MLB) and members of the National Basketball Association (NBA) transition between teams during their career. We find that incorporating social data into various machine learning algorithms substantially improves the algorithms' ability to correctly determine these transitions. In particular, we measure how player performance, team fitness, and social data individually and collectively contribute to predicting these transitions. Incorporating individual performance and team fitness both improve the predictive accuracy of our algorithms. However, this improvement is dwarfed by the improvement seen when we include social data suggesting that social relationships have a comparatively large effect on player transitions in both MLB and in the NBA.