Related papers: Undestanding Baseball Team Standings and Streaks
Frequently in sporting competitions it is desirable to compare teams based on records of varying schedule strength. Methods have been developed for sports where the result outcomes are win, draw, or loss. In this paper those ideas are…
Baseball consists of two teams alternating between batting and fielding while competing to score runs through sequential pitching events. Recent advances in tracking technology have enabled all Major League Baseball (MLB) clubs to record…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
This paper introduces the Bradley-Terry Regression Trunk model, a novel probabilistic approach for the analysis of preference data expressed through paired comparison rankings. In some cases, it may be reasonable to assume that the…
Ranking problems based on pairwise comparisons, such as those arising in online gaming, often involve a large pool of items to order. In these situations, the gap in performance between any two items can be significant, and the smallest and…
Based on decision trees, many fields have arguably made tremendous progress in recent years. In simple words, decision trees use the strategy of "divide-and-conquer" to divide the complex problem on the dependency between input features and…
As a dedicated follower of sports statistics and with the MLB season beginning in late March, I set out to predict how many wins each team would accumulate by the end of the 162 game season. The goal was to build a simulation framework…
There have been more hitting streaks in Major League Baseball than we would expect. All batting lines of MLB hitters from 1957-2006 were randomly permuted 10,000 times and the number of hitting streaks of each length from 2 to 100 was…
Batting average is one of the principle performance measures for an individual baseball player. It is natural to statistically model this as a binomial-variable proportion, with a given (observed) number of qualifying attempts (called…
Estimating ballpark effects and team defense in baseball is challenging because batted-ball outcomes are influenced by multiple factors, including contact quality, ballpark environment, defensive performance, and random variation. In this…
How can balance be quantified in game settings? This question is crucial for game designers, especially in player-versus-player (PvP) games, where analyzing the strength relations among predefined team compositions-such as hero combinations…
We adopt a physically motivated empirical approach to the characterisation of the distributions of twin and triplet primes within the set of primes, rather than in the set of all natural numbers. Remarkably, the occurrences of twins or…
We introduce a three-step framework to determine at which pitches Major League batters should swing. Unlike traditional plate discipline metrics, which implicitly assume that all batters should always swing at (resp. take) pitches inside…
Many complex phenomena, from the selection of traits in biological systems to hierarchy formation in social and economic entities, show signs of competition and heterogeneous performance in the temporal evolution of their components, which…
For nonbalanced paired comparisons, a wide variety of ranking methods have been proposed. One of the best popular methods is the Bradley-Terry model in which the ranking of a set of objects is decided by the maximum likelihood estimates…
We propose and study a new model for competitions, specifically sports multi-player leagues where the initial strengths of the teams are independent i.i.d. random variables that evolve during different days of the league according to…
The Bradley-Terry model is widely used for the analysis of pairwise comparison data and, in essence, produces a ranking of the items under comparison. We embed the Bradley-Terry model within a stochastic block model, allowing items to…
Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the distributions of scored goals for the home and away teams. It turns out…
This paper deals with the estimation of the unknown distribution of hidden random variables from the observation of pairwise comparisons between these variables. This problem is inspired by recent developments on Bradley-Terry models in…
Many popular sports involve matches between two teams or players where each team have the possibility of scoring points throughout the match. While the overall match winner and result is interesting, it conveys little information about the…