Developing an AI system to pick a fantasy football team

Question

I'm looking to build an AI system to "pick" a fantasy football team. I have only basic knowledge of AI techniques (especially when it comes to game theory), so I am looking for advice on what techniques could be used to accomplish this and pointers to some reading materials.

I am aware that this may be a very difficult or maybe even impossible task for AI to accurately complete: however I am not too concerned about the accuracy, rather I am interested in learning some AI and this seems like a fun way to apply it.

Some basic facts about the game:

• A team of 14 players must be picked

• There is a limit on the total cost of players picked

• The players picked must adhere to a certain configuration (there must always be one goalkeeper, at least two defenders, one midfielder and one forward)

• The team may be altered on a weekly basis but removing/adding more than one player a week will incur a penalty

P.S. I have stats on every match played in last season, could this be used to train the AI system?

Answer 1

ESPN and IBM have teamed up to bring a new level of insight to fantasy football team owners: Watson AI. #FantasyFootballFace. Watson is built on an enterprise-grade machine learning pipeline that provides the model to read, understand, and comprehend millions of documents and multimedia sources about fantasy football. The ESPN Fantasy Football with the Watson system has been a significant undertaking with many components.

For the code of project of the fantasy football, refer to the below link:

The Fantasy Football AI framework

For knowing the Behind the code knowledge of Machine learning pipeline for Fantasy Football insights, refer the following link: https://developer.ibm.com/articles/watson-behind-the-code-fantasy-football-2018-part4/

The article mentioned above is the fourth in an eight-part series that takes you behind each component to show you how we used Watson to build a fair world-class AI solution.