The goal of this project is use web scraping in R and machine learning tools in Python to analyze and make predictions about the 2018 NFL draft. I provide preliminary analysis and draft predictions using Linear Regression and XGBoost.
The only file that would need to explicitly be interacted with for scraping is the scrape_data.R file. This scrapes draft and combine information from http://profootballreference.com. The current version of that file imputes data; however, in my Jupyter Notebook I provide an imputation strategy using KNN that may give better results. There are some broken links on the website, which I have explicitly accounted for. These may not be fixed for later or earlier years, so some behavior may not work as expected.