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Interesting...I tried doing machine learning for daily fantasy baseball and it just didn't work. I wrote a scraper that put Fanduel results and contest payout

Interesting...I tried doing machine learning for daily fantasy baseball and it just didn't work. I wrote a scraper that put Fanduel results and contest payout structures into a database, then backtested against thousands of contests to see where I would have wound up had I played in those contests using projections from the machine learning algorithm. I figured I would eventually make the algorithm profitable. Unfortunately I was wrong. I couldn't find any combination of data to feed into the algorithm that consistently put me in the green. At least I wasn't actually playing and losing money. I finally gave up after a few months. The scraper data was fascinating though....there were a few players consistently yielding 80%+ ROI across hundreds of entries.

kylebrown 12y ago
I'm actually surprised you didn't overfit the data until the backtests showed you had a profitable algorithm. I bet most people would've done that.. I'm curious, what kind of algo were you training?
- downandout 12y ago
  With Weka, I was able to test a wide variety of algos. When every Weka algo failed, I tried Google's prediction API with a wide variety of combinations of data and that failed as well. I thought for sure that one of them would work. Unfortunately, not a single one got me profitable over the long term. I could actually win slightly more than 50% of the time on 50/50 and "Double Up" contests, but that doesn't beat the rake.