Sam Ventura

Affiliated Faculty

Bio

Sam Ventura is the Vice President of Hockey Strategy and Research for the Buffalo Sabres of the National Hockey League, and an affiliated faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Statistics & Data Science.  He also serves as an advisory board member for the University of Pittsburgh’s MS in Quantitative Economics program.  Prior to that, he was the Director of Hockey Operations and Director of Hockey Research for the Pittsburgh Penguins; a Visiting Assistant Professor of Statistics at CMU, where he also received his PhD (Statistics, 2015); an assistant coach for Carnegie Mellon’s ice hockey team; and the faculty advisor to the CMU Sports Analytics Club.  Sam has co-authored multiple R packages for open-source data collection and analysis, including nhlscrapr, nflscrapR, and spew, and he co-founded war-on-ice.com.  He co-organizes the annual Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference.

Specific Research Interests

Clustering, data visualization, prediction, record linkage, sports, synthetic data.

Areas of Research

• Statistical Machine Learning
• Privacy and Cyber-security
• Clustering & Unsupervised Methods
• Census and Survey Methods
• Bioinformatics