| This project analyzes Rafael Nadal’s serve performance across his entire career. |
| The goal is to understand whether serve statistics (1st serve %, 2nd serve %, double faults %, etc.) influence: |
| - Match outcome (win or loss) |
| - Differences between wins and losses |
| - Differences between surfaces (Clay, Hard, Grass) |
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| The project includes: |
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| - Data cleaning |
| - Outlier detection (boxplots + Z‑scores) |
| - Feature creation |
| - Visual analysis |
| - Correlation study |
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| - Conclusions about Nadal’s serve performance |
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| The dataset contains Nadal’s match‑by‑match performance, including: |
| - Date |
| - Tournament |
| - Surface |
| - Result |
| - serve statistics |
| - rank ... and more |
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| Step 1 - I asked a question I wanted to focus on, which is about: |
| The main question- How do Nadal’s first serve percentage statistics affect his chances of winning a match |
| The target variable- "Result", which indicates whether Nadal won or lost the match |
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| Step 2- Data Cleaning |
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| I removed irrelevant columns |
| Converted serve statistics to numeric |
| Created a new Win column: |
| 1 → match won ("Nadal d.") |
| 0 → match lost |
| I replaced the missing values with the median. |
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| To find the outliers, I chose the Z-score method, which identifies extremely unusual values. I chose to remain the outlier because it's very common in sports to have outlier and very rare performances. |
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| Step 3 - Distribution Analysis (Histograms) |
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| To understand Nadal’s serve performance, I plotted the distribution of three key serve statistics: |
| - 1st Serve Points Won (%) |
| - 2nd Serve Points Won (%) |
| - Double Fault Percentage (DF%) |
| Nadal’s 1st serve % is usually between 65% and 80%, with a strong concentration around the 70% mark. |
| The 2nd serve % is slightly lower but shows a similar bell-shaped distribution. |
| Double faults % is strongly skewed toward zero, meaning Nadal rarely makes many double faults. |
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| Serve Performance vs Match Outcome (Win vs Loss) |
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| Step 4- I compared Nadal’s serve statistics between the matches he won (1) and the matches he lost (0). |
| (with the same variables than step 3) |
| 1st Serve % is clearly higher in matches he wins |
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| Median ≈ 75% when he wins |
| Median ≈ 65% when he loses (This suggests that Nadal’s first-serve effectiveness is strongly linked to winning). |
| 2nd Serve % also increases when he wins, but the difference is smaller |
| It helps, but has a weaker effect compared to the first serve. |
| Double Fault % is almost the same whether he wins or loses |
| Nadal makes very few double faults overall (Double faults do not significantly affect his match outcome). |
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| step 5- surfaces |
| I asked the question if the playing surface influences Nadal’s serve performance? |
| I compared Nadal’s serve statistics across the three main surfaces he regularly plays on: Hard, Clay. |
| I removed the Carpet surface because the sample size was extremely small (only a few matches). |
| The result was very similar and showed no meaningful differences. |
| Based on these results, the playing surface does NOT significantly influence Nadal’s serve performance. |
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| Step 6- Correlation |
| To explore how Nadal’s serve statistics relate to match outcomes, I computed a correlation matrix using the variables: |
| I interpret the plot with a heatmap. |
| - Win (1 = win, 0 = loss) |
| - 1st% (percentage of points won on first serve) |
| - 2nd% (percen |
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| tage of points won on second serve) |
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| Conclusion of the numbers: |
| - Higher 1st Serve % → Higher probability of winning. |
| - Higher 2nd Serve % also helps, but less strongly. |
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| Conclusion of the question |
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| performance to win his match; the numbers prove it. |
| I saw that the surface doesn't have an impact on the performance of the serves |
| When a player is on his first serve, he is under less stress because if he misses it, he has a second serve, so he can manage more power than a second serve. |
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| https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/69022bd16eadade47dbabbea/hHHtBt4-VhVK8Nsnw2l6E.mp4 |
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| <video controls width="600"> |
| <source src="https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/69022bd16eadade47dbabbea/hHHtBt4-VhVK8Nsnw2l6E.mp4" type="video/mp4"> |
| </video> |
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