Vol:.(1234567890) OPSEARCH (2021) 58:54–70 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12597-020-00470-9 1 3 APPLICATION ARTICLE Sports result prediction using data mining techniques in comparison with base line model Praphula Kumar Jain 1  · Waris Quamer 1  · Rajendra Pamula 1 Accepted: 21 July 2020 / Published online: 3 August 2020 © Operational Research Society of India 2020 Abstract Sports prediction is one of the recent growing areas of interest entailing good pre- diction accuracy. Coaches require models in order to assess their players, analyse opponent teams and formulate winning strategies. Generation of comprehensive statistical data in sports has enabled data mining (DM) techniques to be applied to it in order to extract underlying predictive information. In this paper, an approach based on data mining is proposed for result prediction in sports. The work includes pre-processing of data, feature extraction, attribute selection and application of DM algorithms as a learning strategy. To validate our proposed model, a case study concerning prediction of the results of Indian Premier League (IPL) matches is illustrated. The constructed models are based on the performance of teams in past matches, player performance indices, opposition team information and external fac- tors, and therefore, relevant features are engineered to indicate the same. The best prediction accuracy was found to be 70.58%. Keywords Data mining · Sports prediction · IPL · Classifcation · Cricket 1 Introduction Data mining techniques have been extensively used to extract pattern and knowl- edge from large datasets and fabricate predictive models on them. Despite the increased implementation of data mining techniques in almost all domains, there is a need for more accurate models for prediction in sports. In order to analyze * Praphula Kumar Jain praphulajn1@gmail.com Waris Quamer mr.warisquamer@gmail.com Rajendra Pamula rajendrapamula@gmail.com 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad, Jharkhand 826004, India