Journal of Data Science

Understanding shooting patterns among different players is a fundamental problem in basketball game analyses. In this paper, we quantify the shooting pattern via the field goal attempts and percentages over twelve non-overlapping regions around the front court. A joint Bayesian nonparametric mixture model is developed to find latent clusters of players based on their shooting patterns. We apply our proposed model to learn the heterogeneity among selected players from the National Basketball Association (NBA) games over the 2018–2019 regular season and 2019–2020 bubble season. Thirteen clusters are identified for 2018–2019 regular season and seven clusters are identified for 2019–2020 bubble season. We further examine the shooting patterns of players in these clusters and discuss their relation to players’ other available information. The results shed new insights on the effect of NBA COVID bubble and may provide useful guidance for player’s shot selection and team’s in-game and recruiting strategy planning.

We propose a method of spatial prediction using count data that can be reasonably modeled assuming the Conway-Maxwell Poisson distribution (COM-Poisson). The COM-Poisson model is a two parameter generalization of the Poisson distribution that allows for the flexibility needed to model count data that are either over or under-dispersed. The computationally limiting factor of the COM-Poisson distribution is that the likelihood function contains multiple intractable normalizing constants and is not always feasible when using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. Thus, we develop a prior distribution of the parameters associated with the COM-Poisson that avoids the intractable normalizing constant. Also, allowing for spatial random effects induces additional variability that makes it unclear if a spatially correlated Conway-Maxwell Poisson random variable is over or under-dispersed. We propose a computationally efficient hierarchical Bayesian model that addresses these issues. In particular, in our model, the parameters associated with the COM-Poisson do not include spatial random effects (leading to additional variability that changes the dispersion properties of the data), and are then spatially smoothed in subsequent levels of the Bayesian hierarchical model. Furthermore, the spatially smoothed parameters have a simple regression interpretation that facilitates computation. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach using simulated examples, and a motivating application using 2016 US presidential election voting data in the state of Florida obtained from the Florida Division of Elections.