tldr version: Click here to go straight to the visualization.

The aim of this project when I started was to combine my love of MMA with the skills I’ve developed working in the Business Intelligence field. I knew that the history of fights and fighters in the UFC would be a great data set to work with and could produce interesting results.

While brainstorming ideas for the first data visualization, I came across the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit (JIT). The JIT offers a wide selection of customizable data visualizations. The one that immediately caught my eye was the RGraph (Radial Graph).

With the emergence of Facebook and social networking over the past half decade, the concept of a social graph has been popularized. Using graph theory, each individual is represented as a node (point/circle/etc) with their connections to others represented as an edge (line connecting the points).  I feel like the relatively short history of fighters competing in the UFC is a great fit for this model.

The visualization uses the HTML5 canvas feature. It works best in modern browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox , or IE 9.  I would like to thank mookieghana from http://www.f4wonline.com for providing the majority of the raw data.

Currently 89 fighters are not included because they are missing a connection with the rest of the fighters in the graph. Most are fighters have only had a single appearance in the UFC during their career so far (Dominick Cruz) or have only fought against others without a connection (Jon Hess vs. Andy Anderson).  I realize that a lot more connections could be made if the data included fights outside of the UFC.  Currently I only have UFC results in my database.  I hope to add Pride and WEC results sometime soon.  It would be extremely interesting to run this model against sherdog.com’s fight fighter database.

Click the image below to load the graph.