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In this chapter, we will look at predicting the winner of games of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Matches in the NBA are often close and can be decided at the last minute, making predicting the winner quite difficult. Many sports share this characteristic, whereby the (generally) better team could be beaten by another team on the right day.

Various research into predicting the winner suggests that there may be an upper limit to sports outcome prediction accuracy which, depending on the sport, is between 70 percent and 80 percent. There is a significant amount of research being performed into sports prediction, often through data mining or statistics-based methods.

In this chapter, we are going to have a look at an entry level basketball match prediction algorithm, using decision trees for determining whether a team will win a given match. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite make as much profit as the models that sports betting agencies use, which are often a bit more advanced, more complex, and ultimately, more accurate.