Hi Maveryx, A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here. The Super Bowl is just around the corner, and this year’s championship will be a blast. When the football season is over, there are always stats to calculate! To get into the spirit of post-season football, we analyzed the NFL teams and the players’ catch-and-drop abilities following the same model as the video game Madden NFL 23. The game uses a dice-roll system and player matchup data to determine whether a throw will be caught or dropped by the receiver. Your task is to create an Alteryx workflow that models randomness and chance to predict a binary business outcome. You will simulate a scenario where randomness plays a crucial role in decision-making, similar to how it affects outcomes in sports or real-life business scenarios. The dataset provided contains key attributes for analysis, including team and player stats (Madden 22). Your work will be focused on the All Players sheet. Challenge Tasks: * Create a dice rolling mechanism with three six-sided dice (3d6) and find the modifiers that will influence the outcome based on the dice roll. These modifiers should reflect the impact of random chance on your chosen business scenario. (This is an advanced task. If you are a beginner Designer user, you can use the start workflow Challenge_409_start_file_beginner.) * Find the highest-rated team using their players’ stats. * Pick two teams to go against each other and identify the best players for each position for both teams.* Team 1 will be offense: quarterback (QB) and wide receiver (WR) positions. * Team 2 will be defense: cornerback (CB) position. * Apply the modifier to the matchup between Team 1 and Team 2 to determine if there is a “catch” or a “drop.” This challenge can be solved in two levels. For those eager to enhance their data creation abilities, you have the option to craft the dice and dice rolling mechanism from the ground up. Alternatively, a ready-made dice rolling mechanism is available for use if you are a beginner Designer user. Should you choose to build your own tool, it must include three six-sided dice (3d6), along with all possible combinations of outcomes they can produce. Learn more about 3d6 dice notation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice_notation. Get inspiration on how to solve this Football Fanalytics challenge by reading the NFL Analytics with Alteryx and Madden Blog. Read how to leverage Madden NFL football as inspiration to create better model training data. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Madden/comments/ouzjvd/madden_22_player_ratings_spreadsheet_fully/?rdt=52172 Good luck! Weekly Challenge_409_start_file.yxzp Weekly Challenge_409_start_file_beginner.yxzp Weekly Challenge_409_solution_file.yxzp Reto_204_solucion.yxzp

It is too complated for me and it takes for ever to solve it. So I will just study the solution and call it finished. 😁 Spoiler Weekly Challenge_409_start_file_beginner-Qiu.yxzp

Challenge Completed Spoiler Challenge_409_Joe_Serpis.yxzp

409 Weekly Challenge_409_start_file.yxmd

Challenge #409: Catch or Drop? Predicting Business Outcomes with Randomness

AYXAcademy

Hi Maveryx,

A solution to last week’s challenge can be found here.

The Super Bowl is just around the corner, and this year’s championship will be a blast. When the football season is over, there are always stats to calculate! To get into the spirit of post-season football, we analyzed the NFL teams and the players’ catch-and-drop abilities following the same model as the video game Madden NFL 23. The game uses a dice-roll system and player matchup data to determine whether a throw will be caught or dropped by the receiver.

Your task is to create an Alteryx workflow that models randomness and chance to predict a binary business outcome. You will simulate a scenario where randomness plays a crucial role in decision-making, similar to how it affects outcomes in sports or real-life business scenarios.

The dataset provided contains key attributes for analysis, including team and player stats (Madden 22). Your work will be focused on the All Players sheet.

Challenge Tasks:

Create a dice rolling mechanism with three six-sided dice (3d6) and find the modifiers that will influence the outcome based on the dice roll. These modifiers should reflect the impact of random chance on your chosen business scenario. (This is an advanced task. If you are a beginner Designer user, you can use the start workflow Challenge_409_start_file_beginner.)
Find the highest-rated team using their players’ stats.
Pick two teams to go against each other and identify the best players for each position for both teams.
- Team 1 will be offense: quarterback (QB) and wide receiver (WR) positions.
- Team 2 will be defense: cornerback (CB) position.
Apply the modifier to the matchup between Team 1 and Team 2 to determine if there is a “catch” or a “drop.”

This challenge can be solved in two levels. For those eager to enhance their data creation abilities, you have the option to craft the dice and dice rolling mechanism from the ground up. Alternatively, a ready-made dice rolling mechanism is available for use if you are a beginner Designer user. Should you choose to build your own tool, it must include three six-sided dice (3d6), along with all possible combinations of outcomes they can produce.

Learn more about 3d6 dice notation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice_notation.

Get inspiration on how to solve this Football Fanalytics challenge by reading the NFL Analytics with Alteryx and Madden Blog. Read how to leverage Madden NFL football as inspiration to create better model training data.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Madden/comments/ouzjvd/madden_22_player_ratings_spreadsheet_fully/?rdt=52172

Good luck!

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Weekly Challenge_409_solution_file.yxzp

Reto_204_solucion.yxzp

Advanced

Data Preparation

Difficult

Accepted answers

All comments

ed_hayter

Given Washington's NFL performance this year and my deep-rooted hatred of the Cowboys I wanted to see a result in Alteryx I didn't get to see in real life a Washington win.

The flow could do with more tuning on the modifiers and the attributes used in each scenario (I was quite generous towards Terry over Diggs) but the cruz of it is that we randomly select a throw distance and then use that distance to pick the RR and accuracy ratings for WR and QB respectively - if the throw is inaccurate it will be incomplete. If the throw is accurate we then check the coverage the CB is playing compared to route running to determine how open the receiver is. His openness determines the attributes used to determine if a catch is made or not.

Spoiler

This sample run had Mclaurin catching a short throw from Fitzpatrick against Diggs playing zone coverage where Mclaurin is wide open.

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balajilolla2

Spoiler

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Dev73

My solution

Spoiler

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RWvanLeeuwen

Not a sports fan! But tried to solve this anyways :-)

I am guessing that a Drop means that it was a touchdown and a Catch means the Opponent has intercepted the football?

Here's my take:

Spoiler

(1 run of this workflow is 1 match) -- I figured that I needed a random dice to filter the WR multiplier. In parallel I found the best Team, and a random opponent. Then I applied the WR to the Overall scores and compared the scores per match.

Spoiler

Then I converted the prior workflow to a batch macro using a control parameter. output the results to a YXDB containing ~11k simulated results

Spoiler

Then I built a scaffold of all possible matches (the best as offense, versus the best as defense) between the best team vs all others. I created a scaffold per "MatchID" just to keep track of the rows and how think the confrontation would end. If the overall avg is higher for team 1 then they win and it is a "drop" in my book. The output from the previous step (random drop rate) was then combined with the expected drop rate.

Spoiler

A correlation helped to finalise the expected drop (0 or 1) with the simulated results. This resulted in a perfect correlation. (I could have dichotomised the random drop rates, but I felt a visualisation would be more appropriate)

Challenge_409 - RWvL.yxzp

Kenda

Spoiler

Instructions were a bit confusing, but here is my take

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mmontgomery

Took it a bit far but more details in spoiler

Spoiler

Goal was to compare a sim of 30 coin flips with 30 results based on my logic resulting in a confusion matrix

c409.yxzp

AkimasaKajitani

My solution.

Spoiler

To be the honest, it is too dificult to understand the rule. Originally, the comparing should be done with the appropriate offensive and defensive parameters for each position. But at this time, I use the Overall field.

スクリーンショット 2024-01-17 225937.png

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olga_strubbe

This was a fun and timely challenge. I liked the 'Random % Sample' tool as I don't get to use it nearly as much. I tried to incorporate the random % sample as much as I could for picking the teams and QB, WR and CB players along with the catch or drop outcome. It was quite entertaining!

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RolandSchubert

Spoiler

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alacoume

My solution:

Challenge_409_start_file.yxmd

ahsanaali

Spoiler

challenge_409_Solution_AAA.yxzp

tammybrown_tds

@RWvanLeeuwen,

A "drop" means the receiver didn't catch the ball....so a dead ball. A "catch" means the receiver caught the ball and made a play....usually yardage gained, which could be a touchdown or just yards across the field. If the opponent catches the ball, then it's called an interception.

Hope that helps!

Chris-Nienart

Adding a noise factor to thresholding outcomes can reduce overfitting in classification problems.

However, I couldn't figure out what was the intended implementation of the multiplier. The way I applied it, only the sign and not the magnitude of the multiplier made an impact on the catch/no catch indicator. I'm curious to see how people interpreted the formula from the article.

Task 1: Optimization can depend on the use case, but I thought it was a good idea to combine the 3d6 and scenario generation.

Spoiler

Sort on rand_val and pick the minimum value record by die and scenario. No iterative macro needed!

Fourth input is a scenario count for the row generation.

My-solution-409.yxzp

tammybrown_tds

The instructions were a bit confusing, but I think I got there in the end. The answer to the "Highest Rated Team using player stats" stings a little bit given how my Packers were eliminated from the playoffs Saturday night, but I'll get over it. LOL!

Spoiler

challenge_409_tbrown.yxmd

TonyAndriani

My solution.

Spoiler

Considering that this challenge required substantial knowledge of football and sports video games and I probably know less about either than I know about quantum physics, I was sorely tempted to take a pass on this one (no pun intended). I am somewhat surprised, considering the broad international nature of the Alteryx community that American football is used as the example. Anyway, I took my best shot. I have no idea what 90% of the parameters meant, so I just stuck with "overall" for my calculations.
In the future, please try to avoid challenges that require specialized knowledge unless the relevant information can be included in the instructions...

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ggruccio

Had fun building out the initial logic - then built into a macro to run multiple simulations.

Spoiler

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ARussell34

The flow takes in account of random 3 die rolls which will create a different team output every time (as it should). It took me a second to comprehend how the modifier effects the outcome, but after a quick review understood the negative vs positive values represented a drop or catch. This was a fun one!

AR_challenge409.yxmd

alexnajm

@AYXAcademy I think this challenge needed a lot more description - the solution provided didn't detail any of this "match up position" nor how to apply the multiplier. Just some feedback because otherwise this was a fun challenge!

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Watermark

Spoiler

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Reesetrain2

All,

So, my workflow has Deebo Samuel with an 80% catch rate versus his true 67% catch rate.

I used a standalone workflow with a round for a grouping tool and then no Macro Input, I have never really used this setup before but if you need to run the same workflow with multiple iterations due to a randomness incorporated, I think that this is definitely the way to go!

-Please let me know your thoughts!

Screenshot 2024-01-26 170347.png

Spoiler

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nSpire

Spoiler

image upload failed

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RashedDS

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raeaton

My solution:

Spoiler

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Ray_Pospisil

Python pandas, Databricks.Pyspark, SQL and Alteryx solution

awc409_SQL.txt

awc409_python_pandas.txt

awc409_Pyspark.txt

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gerda

Spoiler

This one was hard!

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DaisukeTsuchiya

Spoiler

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cusher

Spoiler

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ScottLewis

Could have been an interesting challenge if the tasks had been well defined. As it is there is no model for how to apply the multiplier or what most of the player input data means so there isn't really any meaning to be extracted. Also I'm not sure why the easy part (random 3d6) was called out as hard and the hard part (building a statistical model of real world events) was assumed to be trivial. I suppose there's a lesson there but it is in requirements design, not so much Alteryx.

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patrick_digan

Spoiler

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mithily

honestly don't understand what the game plays are but did it anyway

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EdenTP

Spoiler

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