Predicting PGA Tournament Outcomes

Abstract

With the explosion in the popularity of golf and sports betting, sports analysts have attempted to predict outcomes of golf tournaments based on statistical data. Many sports fans and analysts feel that golf is a game that can not be accurately predicted. However, professional golfers are not like your everyday amateur golfer, their high level of skill and consistency gives data scientists a better chance of predicting how the results of a professional golf tournament can unfold. In recent years, there has been a large push for collecting more data in regards to player performance on the PGA Tour with the introduction of ShotLink, which is the PGA Tour's proprietary method for collecting player statistics. This development has led to a massive amount of available statistics for analysts and data scientists to consider when predicting tournament outcomes. While this is a great advancement for the game of golf, it has also led to an overwhelming flood of data that can muddle the big picture of players' performances. This work will provide visualizations of critical player statistics as well as consider the statistics of each individual course the tour visits in order to determine a group of players that will perform well at each PGA Tour event.