Understanding Analyst Workflow
through Baseball AnalyticsJustin Middleton, Kathryn T. Stolee,
Emerson Murphy-Hill
North Carolina State University
[email protected]
Analytics + Software DevelopmentA modern match! But how have the
co-developmentsof these fields influenced how the analyst learns
andpractices the analytic workflows to fulfill their job?
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Who are they?10 analysts
3 independent consultants3 university students2 MLB employees
(current and former)1 hobbyist1 professor
Of the participants, 9 of 10have a formal background inmath or
statistics Also, 5 of10 have some computerscience training, 3 of 10
witheconomics.
Future Work
What do they use?
How do they work?
How do they learn?
• Value of a research question guided by resulting wins and
runs.
• Data often from personal, community web scrapers of MLB
sources.
• Process rarely formalized; iterations quick, agile, and
exploratory.
• Self-awareness of lack of formal software training often used
to explain lack of documenting and testing.
• Biggest barriers: lack of time, lack of experience, lack of
complex data.
• Learn by doing (10/10); some use baseball as an educational
sandbox for useful techniques
• Blogs (10/10), with and without code.• For some, books are
essential; for
others, ineffective.• Code examples unanimously desired;
efficiency descriptions often not.• Resource must be credible,
accessible,
and for some, open-source.
• Are these descriptions representative? Create surveys to reach
a broader, more varied population of analysts, baseball and
not.
• What is it about blogs that makes them effective? Perform a
feature analysis of statistical tutorials.
A Focus on a Specific Case
Baseball analytics combines a long,documented history of
analysis with freeaccess to much of its data. This hasallowed
professional and amateuranalysts alike to pose and answerquestions,
like those below, in public.
The Methodology for Community Analysis
We recruited and interviewed 10 analystsfrom baseball
conferences, onlinecommunities, and references to ask about
1. The experiences and resources, formaland informal, by which
they developedtheir workflow, and
2. How the parts of their workflowsupport or hurt their search
for results
We applied techniques of groundedtheory to analyze and aggregate
thethemes common among the community.
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