2025-24679-NFL-Yards-Predictor

🧠 Model Card: Walk-Forward AutoGluon Model (By Week)

📘 Overview

This model performs walk-forward training and evaluation for predicting NFL wide receiver (WR) receiving yards on a week-by-week basis using AutoGluon’s TabularPredictor. It leverages historical player embeddings, pregame contextual features, and weather/game metadata to iteratively train and test within each NFL season (2016–2025).

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🧩 Model Details

Model Type: Walk-forward regression (AutoGluon TabularPredictor) Framework: AutoGluon Tabular Author: Sebastian Andreu License: MIT Primary Use: Predicting receiving_yards for each wide receiver before a game is played.

Key Idea

Instead of training one global model, this script re-trains weekly within each season, always using all prior weeks as training data and the next week as the test set. This ensures realistic forward-looking performance without data leakage.

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⚙️ Data

Source Datasets

The model loads and concatenates season datasets from:

SebastianAndreu/24679_NFL_WR_Dataset_<YEAR>

for 2016 ≤ YEAR ≤ 2025.

Each dataset includes pregame features such as weather, team matchup, and Vegas lines.

Features Used

Pregame input variables:

• defteam
• posteam
• surface
• is_dome
• is_rain
• is_snow
• is_clear
• temp_f
• humidity_pct
• wind_mph
• home_team
• away_team
• pregame_spread
• pregame_total
• passer_player_id
• receiver_player_id

The dataset is also merged with player_historical_embeddings.csv, which provides dense numerical representations of player histories.

Target Variable

receiving_yards — the number of receiving yards gained by the WR in the upcoming game.

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🧮 Training Procedure

Walk-Forward Logic

For each season:

1. Extract the total number of weeks in that season.

2. For each week W starting from 2:

   • Train on data from weeks < W.
   • Test on data from week W.
   • Train a new AutoGluon model from scratch (10-minute time limit).

3. Collect predictions and evaluation metrics.

AutoGluon Configuration

TabularPredictor(
    label="receiving_yards",
    path=model_dir,
    verbosity=0
).fit(
    train_data=train[features + [target]],
    time_limit=600,
    presets="medium_quality_faster_train"
)

Time Limit: 600 seconds per week Preset: medium_quality_faster_train Verbosity: 0 (minimal logging)

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📊 Evaluation

Metric

The model computes Mean Absolute Error (MAE) over all weekly predictions.

Output

After all walk-forward runs:

• walkforward_predictions.csv — contains true vs. predicted values per week.

• Columns:

  • season
  • week
  • true
  • pred
  • error = |true - pred|

Example final output:

✅ Walk-forward complete!
Total predictions: 3,200
Mean Absolute Error: 12.47
📥 Saved: walkforward_predictions.csv

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📢 Artifacts

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🧠 Intended Use

Goal: Predict individual WR performance before each NFL game. Primary Users: Sports analytics researchers, fantasy football data scientists, and betting modelers. Not intended for: Real-time in-game prediction or commercial wagering advice.

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⚠️ Limitations

• Training each week from scratch is computationally expensive.
• Does not include injury or roster change data.
• Embeddings rely on prior model quality (player_historical_embeddings.csv).
• Accuracy varies across early vs. late season due to data availability.

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🧩 Future Improvements

• Incorporate transfer learning between seasons.
• Add injury & snap count features.
• Experiment with AutoGluon ensemble distillation to reduce retraining cost.
• Combine with Model 1 embeddings pipeline for joint optimization.