How to Win More Fights in the UFC

Project Overview
Background: The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is a mixed martial arts company based in Las Vegas, United States. Fights occur throughout the year within the 11 different weight classes, and has hosted over 600 events. The dataset used for this analysis includes data from every fight on record (from 1993 - 2021), and includes each fighter's career stats before the fight, stats from the fight, and other info (such as location and referee).
Motivation: In order to have a successful and long career in the UFC, fighters need to have a higher win/loss ratio.
Objective: Understand the key factors for winning fights.
Scope: The project contains data from 1993 - 2021 and will be used to strategize training for fighters' first big fight.
My Contributions
Sourced Open Data


Explored Relationships, such as correlations, using Python and libraries


Created Geographical Visualizations and other Statistical Visualizations


Created Supervised and Unsupervised Machine Learning Models


Sourced and Analyzed Time Series Data
Created Data Dashboards
- In order to have a long successful career, individuals must focus on having a higher win - loss percentage as that will increase longevity.

- The biggest indicator in a fighter's career win percentage is higher number of wins by KO/TKO.

- We also found a high correlation between number of knockdowns and number of wins by KO/TKO, but this was not supported by the regression analysis.

- Beginner fighters should have a major focus on knockdowns and ending the fight off of a KO/TKO instead of going the distance of the entire fight.
Results & Recommendations