How to devise ranking of a player using the past performance statistics?

While buying players at the auction, one of the most important factor that franchisee looks
at is the players past performance. This helps in determining the quality of the player and in
turn the bid amount for that particular player. So it is often useful to develop an index, a
single score, which will provide details of that players quality and its past performance. This
study is aimed at creating such index separately for bowlers and batsmen and in turn rank
these players according to their performance in IPL 2014 season.
When considering batsmen, the variables are:
Runs: The total number of runs scored by a player in the IPL 2014 season.
Batting Average (Ave): The total number of runs a batsman has scored divided by the total
number of times he has been called out in the IPL 2014 season. This measure gives inflated
readings for batsman with multiple Not Outs. This is the reason it should not be solely
used to determine performance of batsman.
Batting Strike Rate (SR): The Batting Strike Rate is defined as the number of runs scored per
100 balls faced by a batsman in the IPL 2014 season. Higher the strike rate more aggressive
is the batsman, which is what is required in 20-20 format.
Fours: The total number of boundaries made in the IPL 2014 season by a batsman.
Sixes: The total number of sixes made in the IPL 2014 season by a batsman.
Cumulative Half Centuries: Since complete centuries are very rare in IPL, one century will be
treated as 2 half centuries. So, cumulative no of half centuries will be actual half centuries
scored and twice the no of centuries scored.
For measuring bowling performance, following variables are used:
Wickets: The number of wickets taken by a bowler. The goal of a bowler is to get the
maximum number of wickets by using a minimum number of balls while simultaneously
conceding a minimum number of runs.
Bowling Average (Ave = Runs Conceded/Wkts): The average number of runs conceded per
wicket.
Strike Rate (SR = Balls/Wkts): The average number of balls bowled per wicket taken.
Economy Rate (Econ = Runs/ (overs bowled): The average number of runs conceded per
over.
4w Haul: Since not a single baller has achieved 5W haul in IPL season 2014, for this study
4W haul will be considered as one of the influencing variables for bowling performance.
Due to high degree of correlation that might be present in some of the above variables,
constructing a measure for analysing batting/bowling performance requires these variables
to be reduced into set of uncorrelated ones.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a nonparametric variable reduction technique well-
suited for correlated data that can be effectively used in our context. One objective of
principal component analysis is to collapse a set of correlated variables into fewer
uncorrelated variables as linear combinations of the original variables. PCA aims to reduce
the observed variables down to a smaller number of principal components, which account
for most of the variation occurring in the originally observed variables. These can be utilized
to provide summarized measures of performance. Because all the above variables are
measured on very different scales, they must be standardized before PCA analysis. Then
final index score will be calculated as a weighted average of all major PCs. Weights for each
PC value will be the percentage of variance explained by that PC.

How to arrive at a best possible team structure within budgetary constraints?
The idea for searching results regarding the above problem came from the fact that all IPL
team owners get a limited amount of money to buy their respective teams. They cant go all
the way to buy all high performance players due to highly competitive nature of the sport as
well as of the bidding and limited resources. In order to solve this problem, idea is to divide
all participating bowlers and batsmen in different clusters depending upon their
performance so that company owners have multiple pool of players each having
homogeneous mix of players in terms of performance. With this classification owners can
decide how many candidates they want from which performance category. Also, ideal
average auction price of the players for each pool will be a good indicator for determining
the price to be bid for any particular individual. In this way, bidders can actually plan their
bidding strategy beforehand keeping the limited amount of money and team requirements
in mind.
Cluster Analysis helps in segmenting the sample population into multiple heterogeneous
groups each having different performance characteristics. All the members inside any cluster
will have homogeneous levels of the performance. Cluster analysis will be performed after
finding out the principal components so that all uncorrelated variables are used to segment
the players. Average auction price of each cluster can also be calculated in order to give an
indicative price for the players belonging to particular cluster.