Data Mining and Its Applications in Sports

With the rapidly developing technology, there has been a great increase in stored data. It is very important to be able to distinguish important and desired data from so many data. The most effective method for this is the data mining method. In its shortest definition data mining is the process of extracting desired, significant and valuable information from a lot of data stored in a storage medium. Although data mining is a new issue, there are many application areas of it. Medicine, biology and genetics are the most used application areas. The purpose of this study is to examine the use of data mining in sports. While there are not many studies about data mining in sports in our country, this field has developed considerably in abroad. Sport is a very suitable field for the techniques of data mining. There are a lot of datum about the athletes, teams, competitions and seasons. By analyzing these datum, the scores of future competitions can be predicted, new strategies can be defined in a game. Furthermore; in the selection of athletes, coaches, facilities and sports equipments these datum can be used and we can make predictions about performance evaluations, injury risks of athletes, ticket sale