Welcome to Bracketology!

The goal of bracketology is to speed up the analysis of NCAA march madness data and help develop algorithms for filling out brackets.

Documentation:	https://bracketology.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
GitHub Repo:	https://github.com/stahl085/bracketology
Issue Tracker:	https://github.com/stahl085/bracketology/issues
Backlog:	https://github.com/stahl085/bracketology/projects/1?fullscreen=true
PyPI:	https://pypi.org/project/bracketology/

Before You Start

Here are the main things you need to know:

• The main parts of this package are the Bracket objects and simulator functions in the simulators module
• A Bracket is composed of Team and Game objects
• Game objects have two Team objects as attributes, and the round number
• Teams have a name, seed, and dictionary for statistics
• Simulator functions have 1 argument of type Game, and return the winning Team of that Game

Installation

Install from pip

pip install bracketology

Or download directly from PyPi

Getting Started

Import bracketology and create a bracket from last year.

from bracketology import Bracket, Game, Team

# Create a bracket object from 2019
year = 2019
b19 = Bracket(year)

Tutorial

Inspecting the Bracket Object

Here are three different ways you can inspect the Bracket.

• Inspect teams in each region (dictionary of actual results)
• Inspect actual results by round (dictionary)
• Inspect simulated results by round (list of Team attributes)

Get Teams in each Region

Print out all the teams in each region. The regions attribute is a dictionary with the information of all the teams in each region.

>>> print(b19.regions)
{
    'East': [{'Team': 'Duke', 'Seed': 1},
             {'Team': 'Michigan St', 'Seed': 2},
             {'Team': 'LSU', 'Seed': 3},
             ...],
    'West': [{'Team': 'Gonzaga', 'Seed': 1},
             {'Team': 'Michigan', 'Seed': 2},
             {'Team': 'Texas Tech', 'Seed': 3},
             ...],
    'Midwest': [{'Team': 'North Carolina', 'Seed': 1},
                {'Team': 'Kentucky', 'Seed': 2},
                {'Team': 'Houston', 'Seed': 3},
                ...],
    'South': [{'Team': 'Virginia', 'Seed': 1},
              {'Team': 'Tennessee', 'Seed': 2},
              {'Team': 'Purdue', 'Seed': 3},
              ...]
}

Actual Results by Round

The result attribute will return a dictionary (similar to regions above) but will be broken out by which teams actually made it to each round. You can use it to inspect the real tournament results.

>>> print(b19.result.keys())
dict_keys(['first', 'second', 'sweet16', 'elite8', 'final4', 'championship', 'winner'])

>>> print(b19.result['final4'])
[{'Team': 'Michigan St', 'Seed': 2}, {'Team': 'Virginia', 'Seed': 1},
 {'Team': 'Texas Tech', 'Seed': 3}, {'Team': 'Auburn', 'Seed': 5}]

>>> print(b19.result.get('winner'))
{'Team': 'Virginia', 'Seed': 1}

Simulation Results by Round

Print out all the teams that are simulated to make it to each round. The first round is filled out by default. This is a list of Team objects that are simulated to make it to each round. Right now round2 is an empty list because we have not simulated the bracket yet.

>>> print(b19.round1)
[<1 Duke>, <2 Michigan St>, <3 LSU>, ... , <1 Gonzaga>, <2 Michigan>, <3 Texas Tech>,
 ... , <1 North Carolina>, <2 Kentucky>, <3 Houston>, ... , <1 Virginia>, <2 Tennessee>, <3 Purdue>]

>>> print(b19.round2)
[]

Creating a Simulator Algorithm

A simulator function needs to take in a Game and Return a Team.

First we create some faux teams and games to test our simulator function on.

# Create teams
team1 = Team(name='Blue Mountain State',seed=1)
team2 = Team(name='School of Hard Knocks',seed=2)
​
# Create a game between the teams
game1 = Game(team1, team2, round_number=1)

Then we define the simulator function.

import random
def pick_a_random_team(the_game):

    # Extract Teams from Game
    team1 = the_game.top_team
    team2 = the_game.bottom_team
​
    # Randomly select a winner
    if random.random() < 0.5:
        winner = team1
    else:
        winner = team2

    # Return the lucky team
    return winner

​ Test the function out on a game.

>>> pick_a_random_team(game1)
<2 School of Hard Knocks>

Let's run some simulations with our function!

# Initialize Simulation Parameters
BMS_wins = 0
HardKnocks_wins = 0
n_games = 1000
​
# Loop through a bunch of games
for i in range(n_games):

    # Simulate the winner
    winner = pick_a_random_team(game1)

    # Increment win totals
    if winner.seed == 1:
        BMS_wins += 1
    elif winner.seed == 2:
        HardKnocks_wins += 1
    else:
        raise Exception("We have a tie??")
​
# Calculate total win percentage
BMS_win_pct = round(BMS_wins/n_games, 4) * 100
HardKnocks_win_pct = round(HardKnocks_wins/n_games, 4) * 100
​
# Print out results
print(f"Blue Mountain State Win Percentage:   %{BMS_win_pct}")
print(f"School of Hard Knocks Win Percentage: %{HardKnocks_win_pct}")

Output:

Blue Mountain State Win Percentage:   %50.9
School of Hard Knocks Win Percentage: %49.1

Evaluting Simulator Results

Let's evaluate our simulator function on some actual brackets.

# Initialize simulation parameters
n_sims = 1000 # number of times to simulate through all years
total_sims = (n_sims * len(brackets))
scores = []
correct_games = []

# Loop through a plethora of brackets
for i in range(n_sims):
    for bracket in brackets:

        # Run the algorithm on the bracket
        bracket.score(sim_func=pick_a_random_team, verbose=False)

        # Save the scoring results in a list
        scores.append(bracket.total_score)
        correct_games.append(bracket.n_games_correct)

# Calculate the average across all simulations
avg_score = round(sum(scores) / total_sims)
avg_correct = round(sum(correct_games) / total_sims)

# Print result
print(f"Average number total score {avg_score}/192")
print(f"Average number of games guessed correctly {avg_correct}/64")

Output:

Average number total score 31/192
Average number of games guessed correctly 21/64

Easy, right!