Heuristics for Winner Prediction in International Cricket Matches

Cricket is popularly known as the game of gentlemen. The game of cricket has been introduced to the World by England. Since the introduction till date, it has become the second most ever popular game. In this context, few a data mining and analytical techniques have been proposed for the same. In this work, two different scenario have been considered for the prediction of winning team based on several parameters. These scenario are taken for two different standard formats for the game namely, one day international (ODI) cricket and twenty-twenty cricket (T-20). The prediction approaches differ from each other based on the types of parameters considered and the corresponding functional strategies. The strategies proposed here adopts two different approaches. One approach is for the winner prediction for one-day matches and the other is for predicting the winner for a T-20 match. The approaches have been proposed separately for both the versions of the game pertaining to the intra-variability in the strategies adopted by a team and individuals for each. The proposed strategies for each of the two scenarios have been individually evaluated against existing benchmark works, and for each of the cases the duo of approaches have outperformed the rest in terms of the prediction accuracy. The novel heuristics proposed herewith reflects efficiency and accuracy with respect to prediction of cricket data.