🥊 UFC Data Lab – Comprehensive UFC Fights Dataset & Analysis

UFC is the largest MMA promotion in the world, it is in the top 5-10 sports promotions in the US, and growing! It outgrew such leagues as the NBA, F1, Champions League, NHL, NFL, MLB, and others in terms of relative pct growth over the last 7 years.

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This repository is a complete UFC fights dataset project containing every single UFC fight, fighter stats, and official fight scorecards.

Data was scraped, OCR-parsed from scorecard images (using PaddleOCR), cleaned, and preprocessed for analysis. Finally, the data was explored through EDA-driven storytelling and summarized in a presentation of key findings.

📊 Project Outcomes

By the end of this project, the following were achieved:
✔️ UFC fight stats scraped
✔️ UFC scorecards scraped
✔️ Scorecards OCR-parsed
✔️ Dataset cleaned & preprocessed
✔️ Final dataset organized for analysis
✔️ EDA questions posed & answered
✔️ Results presented in a clear report

🔑 Features

• 📥 Scraping UFC Stats & Scorecards – automated collection of official data
• 🔍 OCR Processing – extracting structured data from official scorecard images
• 🧹 Data Cleaning & Preprocessing – ready-to-use datasets for research & analysis
• 📂 Organized Dataset Storage – structured for smooth EDA workflows
• 📈 Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) – insights into UFC fights, fighters, and outcomes
• 🎤 Presentation of Findings – data-driven stories and visualizations

📡 Data Sources

• UFC Official Fight Statistics
• UFC Official Scorecards

⚙️ Installation

Clone the repo and set up the environment:

# 1. Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/komaksym/UFC-DataLab.git

# 2. Verify conda installation
conda --version

# 3. Create virtual environment from config
conda env create -f environment.yml

# 4. Activate the environment
conda activate paddle_env

📂 Directory Structure

UFC-DataLab/
├── data/                     
│   ├── external_data/         # External reference datasets
│   ├── merged_stats_n_scorecards/   # Final merged dataset
│   ├── scorecards/            # Raw + OCR-processed scorecards
│   ├── src/                   # Data-related scripts & notebooks
│   └── stats/                 # UFC fight statistics
│
├── src/                       
│   ├── EDA/                   # Exploratory Data Analysis notebooks
│   ├── scorecard_OCR/         # OCR parsing scripts
│   └── scraping/              # Web scraping spiders
│
└── tests/                     
    ├── OCR_parsing/           # OCR unit tests
    └── scrapers/              # Scraper unit tests

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

• Open an Issue to report bugs or request features
• Submit a Pull Request (PR) for improvements

⭐ Why This Project Matters

This project provides one of the most complete UFC datasets available — combining official fight stats with OCR-parsed scorecards. It opens the door for:

• Sports analytics & machine learning models
• UFC win prediction research
• Fighter performance tracking
• Data storytelling around MMA

👉 If you find this project useful, don’t forget to ⭐ star this repository to support its growth!