Sports

Advanced Scout^TM is a data mining and business application built in partnership with IBM. The purpose of the Advanced Scout application is to help NBA coaches use business intelligence technologies and data mining to identify patterns hidden in large amounts of disparate data that could make a difference in winning or losing a professional basketball game. Using event data from a court-side data collection system as well as unstructured data sources like multimedia data of NBA game footage, Advanced Scout helps the coaches in pre-game preparation, post-game analysis and even real-time analysis to better understand effective/ineffective player combinations, point differentials, shooting performance, shot charts, team possessions, player performance, and rebounding performance.

Because the volume of data generated during every NBA game is so great, it's not possible for a coach to keep track of all the variables and the multiple combinations of possible variables that change quickly during the course of a basketball game. Consequently, a tool was needed that could mine all the NBA data sources for subtle and previously unknown patterns that might exist in the data pertaining to player performance, interactions and events on the court.

Advanced Scout is now an integral part of the coaching process used by several NBA teams to quickly and effectively develop game strategies based on integrated analysis of disparate data and video sources. This application has been prominently featured in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, Computer World, PC Week, CNN, Fox, Discovery, and MSNBC

Other applications have been built by Virtual Gold for other sports domains including the PGA (Professional Golf Assocation), MLB (Major League Baseball), Tennis, and Cricket.