2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas

Turn inspirations into your passion project.

This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Check out some projects

Analyzing Pace-of-Play in Soccer using Spatio-Temporal Event Data

In this project, you will create and explore pace-of-play metrics in soccer and determine their effectiveness in predicting the outcome of a match. Through this process, you will learn to manipulate complex datasets, conduct spatio-temporal analysis and implement two different machine learning models. This project will culminate in a research paper or another method that displays the research results (i.e. Bookdown).

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Ethan

Marketing to Free Agents

One project idea that I have had since writing my senior thesis involves combining the business and performance side of sports. When a player hits free agency in any sport, teams and General Managers across the league throw money at the player in hopes that he or she will sign with their team. However, choosing a new team is a life-altering decision that incorporates more than just salary as we have seen all too often. The goal of this research would be to derive a sales and marketing strategy with which General Managers can approach free agents. Through determining which factors - including salary, city quality, cost of living, team quality, etc. - move the needle most for players, this strategy could effectively help teams market themselves to free agents and increase the likelihood of not only signing their desired players, but potentially signing them for a discounted price.

Sports Analytics, Economics, Business

Molly

Has Economic Inequality Transformed Innovation?

Historically, innovation in the consumer goods space has led to two beneficial outcomes for consumers: (1) an improvement in product features and (2) a reduction in product prices. In this paper, we argue that the increased concentration of wealth over the last 50 years in the US has shifted the benefits of innovation away from (2) by disincentivizing firms from focusing on price reductions as a means to achieve growth. To support this argument, we use the profit pool model and analyze the available profit pool by price point for a selection of consumer goods and electronics.

History, Languages, Sports Analytics, Economics, Business

Joseph

The Impact of a Basketball Player's Angle Towards the Basket on Shooting Percentage

This project involves analyzing the effect that the angle between which a basketball player receives a pass from a teammate and the basket has on their chance of making a shot. I hypothesize that as the angle decreases, the chance of making the shot increases. This project could help basketball teams strategize their offensive schemes to increase their shooting efficiency.

Sports Analytics

Nick

Player Projection Model

538's RAPTOR and basketball index's PIPM are just two examples of predictive models that take in a players past and current performance to predict out how they will be in the coming years. Similar to the draft model, understanding which player's are on the verge of improving and which have the potential to decline is important for NBA front offices. This project will include data gathering and cleaning, predictive modeling with the potential to create an app based visualization to show results.

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

The A is for Analytics -- An examination of the statistical metrics commonly used in the NBA

While the impact that the "analytics revolution" has had on the NBA over the last two decades is undeniable, the value of individual statistical metrics is not. In fact, the continued onslaught of new "advanced stats" has many fans questioning the value of such statistics altogether. After all, if I can argue any player's case by cherry-picking the right advanced stat, what good are such metrics in the first place? In this project, the student will read up on each and every metric commonly encountered in basketball discussions and GOAT debates, from the traditional box-score numbers to modern inventions such as Adjusted Plus-Minus. The goal of the project is for the student to understand all of those metrics and to critically examine their origins, gaining meaningful knowledge about both basketball and statistics while furthering their critical-thinking skills in the process. Depending on student preference, the project could result in a literature review, presentation or YouTube explainer video, among other things.

Physics, Sports Analytics, Math

Robert

NBA Analysis Using Tableau/PowerBI

Loading and cleaning data in either platform and working through the different steps to visualize the data such as who leads the leagues in assist, points, top scorers of each position etc..

Sports Analytics, Business, Organizational Leadership

Coty

Whitespaces in Social Media

The world has come to love social media and all of its wonder. Today social media is still being understood at the most basic levels because it has only been around for a short amount of time. How do we use data to find whitespaces in the social media landscape to help grow a business. What strategies can be implemented and or tools used to increase engagement and hopefully profits.

Sports Analytics

cameron

Using biomedical sensing data to examine indicators of cognitive decline over time

Providing that there is accessible sensing data collected from Dementia and Alzheimer's patients, analysis can be performed on gait (walking speed), balance, and circadian rhythm changes over time. Perhaps the student can train a classifier to predict the likelihood that an undiagnosed elderly person has cognitive impairment given their health data over some extended period of time. This project could culminate in an interactive web app or a research paper / blog post.

Computer Science, Sports Analytics, Quantitative, AI/ML

Sejal

Stadium and Attendance Project

I have data on stadium capacities and season attendance numbers from all of the Big 4 leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) going back 20+ years (up to 2021). Maybe some interesting insights can be found from that? It would be up to the students to come up with where to go on this project!

Sports Analytics

Joseph

Player Projection Model

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

Player Projection Model

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

Neuroimaging Classification: a machine learning approach for glioma detection

Given brain MRI scans, the student will apply image processing techniques to get usable black-and-white image image objects and feed them into a classifier to automatically extract tumor information from the scans, thus reducing the burden on imaging specialists by augmenting the task of medical diagnosis with AI and technology.

Computer Science, Sports Analytics, Quantitative, AI/ML

Sejal

Do the NFL combine drills predict a college athlete's future success in the NFL?

There's a lot of open-access data on NFL (and more) athletes' prior performance in college and their NFL combine drill performance. We could gather this data on players and see whether and to what extent NFL combine drill performance or past college performance (i.e. yards received, etc) predict the NFL performance (or Fantasy points) of a player in their first year in the NFL.

Social, Sports Analytics

Drew

Player Projection Model

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

Do companies see good stock price returns after Super Bowl ads?

Everyone knows to expect ads from companies like Coke, Doritos (owned by Pepsi), beer companies, insurance companies, and more, but when these companies put out "good ads" do they see more of a change in stock price than those that put out "bad ads"?

Sports Analytics

Joseph

Basketball Statistics Reporting Website.

Not interested in predictive modeling? cleaningtheglass.com is a great example of the the usefulness of a clean and important reporting tool. This project will be more heavily focused on the data engineering and gathering and front end visualization.

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

Basketball Statistics Reporting Website.

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

Machine Learning in Sports

First gain an understanding of how machine learning is used in sports and sport science today before attempting to implement new architectures and methods on available youtube data. Baseball has a fantastic array of data that can easily be used for projects and can teach web scraping skills as well as machine learning techniques.

Engineering, Computer Science, Sports Analytics, AI/ML

Derek

Sentiment analysis of COVID-19 vaccine tweets

Apply data mining to query and synthesize hundreds of thousands of tweets and perform sentiment analysis to compare which COVID-19 vaccine is most promising in different geographic regions. Compare which side effects are most predominant among Pfizer vaccine recipients versus Moderna vaccine recipients. This project would likely culminate in a Medium article which takes the reader through the project from exploratory data analysis to code implementation, and finally a well-articulated discussion of research findings and limitations.

Computer Science, Sports Analytics, Quantitative, AI/ML

Sejal