MambaNet: A Hybrid Neural Network for Predicting the NBA Playoffs
This work addresses sports analytics for NBA playoff predictions, but it is incremental as it applies existing hybrid methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackled predicting NBA playoff game outcomes by developing MambaNet, a hybrid neural network that processes time-series statistics, achieving an AUC of 0.72 to 0.82 and outperforming baseline models.
In this paper, we present Mambanet: a hybrid neural network for predicting the outcomes of Basketball games. Contrary to other studies, which focus primarily on season games, this study investigates playoff games. MambaNet is a hybrid neural network architecture that processes a time series of teams' and players' game statistics and generates the probability of a team winning or losing an NBA playoff match. In our approach, we utilize Feature Imitating Networks to provide latent signal-processing feature representations of game statistics to further process with convolutional, recurrent, and dense neural layers. Three experiments using six different datasets are conducted to evaluate the performance and generalizability of our architecture against a wide range of previous studies. Our final method successfully predicted the AUC from 0.72 to 0.82, beating the best-performing baseline models by a considerable margin.