A Study on Soccer Transfers Data Using Market Basket Analysis

Abstract

Although more than 20 years old, Market Basket Analysis (MBA) (or association rules mining) can still be a very useful technique to gain insights in large transactional data sets. The classical example is transactional data in a supermarket. For each customer we know what the individual products (items) are that he has put in his basket and bought. Other use cases for MBA could be web click data, log files, and even questionnaires. To perform MBA we need of course data, but we don’t have real transactional data from a retailer that we can present here. So we are using soccer data instead. The data from eleven European soccer leagues starting from season. After some data wrangling we will able to generate a transactional data set suitable for market basket analysis. This analysis will fetch us results in the transformations of the players this helps us in finding the strengths and players dependencies for a team. n our research we used association rules between players and teams in the market basket. These associations show a variety transfers between the players. To show the dependence between the players and teams we used a Web plot.