This is how I used machine learning to predict Villanova would win the 2016 March Madness…

My machine learning model accurately predicted Villanova would win the championship, netted me first place out of 34 in my office pool, 63rd place out of 608 in the Kaggle competition (top 11%) and 123,000 out of 13 million in ESPN's overall leaderboard (top 1%). I wrote a post about this before the tournament with the promise that if it worked out, I'd do a full writeup and release the code. I'm thankful to say it all panned out and here we go! There is a boatload of luck that goes along with this. Anyone who watched even the last 5 seconds of the championship game knows this.