Association Rule Mining Approach in Strategy Planning for Team India in ICC World Cup 2015

Performance analysis in every sport is essential to find out the weaknesses and strengths of the players. In a team game like cricket, analysis of career-data is indispensable to get the insight of the players´ performance, which helps the selectors to do their job flawlessly and also helps the players´ themselves to identify their weaknesses and their strengths. And, when the time comes for world cup cricket, every team looks for their best team-combination to be available on the ground to achieve the desired result in their favour. Association rule mining techniques reveal the unknown information from a huge set of data, and this technique can be used in extracting the information from the performance-data of the players. In this paper, we have applied association rule mining technique on individual Indian players´ career-record to obtain the underlying unknown relations of several factors impacting the players´ performances. This analysis could help in selecting the best-suited team-combination in a given match condition. The relation among various intrinsic factors such as venue of the match, batting first or second, batting position (of batsmen), strike-rate and runs (of batsmen), economy-rate and wickets taken (of bowlers) is analyzed. The result of this study could be useful for Indian team-captain and team-manager in decision making and strategy planning and could also boost the chances of success for team India for the world cup 2015.