{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,8]],"date-time":"2026-10-08T19:17:52Z","timestamp":1791487072819,"version":"4.3.4"},"reference-count":52,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"12","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2016,12,16]],"date-time":"2016-12-16T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1481846400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["Grant No. 61202397"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["Grant No. 61202397"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Doctoral Program of the Higher Education of China","award":["Grant No. 20114301120001"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["Grant No. 20114301120001"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Predicting the outcome of National Basketball Association (NBA) matches poses a challenging problem of interest to the research community as well as the general public. In this article, we formalize the problem of predicting NBA game results as a classification problem and apply the principle of Maximum Entropy to construct an NBA Maximum Entropy (NBAME) model that fits to discrete statistics for NBA games, and then predict the outcomes of NBA playoffs using the model. Our results reveal that the model is able to predict the winning team with 74.4% accuracy, outperforming other classical machine learning algorithms that could only afford a maximum prediction accuracy of 70.6% in the experiments that we performed.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e18120450","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2016,12,16]],"date-time":"2016-12-16T10:55:28Z","timestamp":1481885728000},"page":"450","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":30,"title":["Predicting the Outcome of NBA Playoffs Based on the Maximum Entropy Principle"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"18","author":[{"given":"Ge","family":"Cheng","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Information Engineering, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9902-6870","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zhenyu","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Mathematics and Computational Science, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7671-1982","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Moses","family":"Kyebambe","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Mathematics and Computational Science, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8839-3069","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Nasser","family":"Kimbugwe","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Information Engineering, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2016,12,16]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"Cvetovitch, A., and Kellner, D. 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