Related papers: Undestanding Baseball Team Standings and Streaks
Superstars often dominate key tasks because of their exceptional abilities, but this concentration of responsibility may unintentionally limit on-the-job learning opportunities for others. Using panel data from Major League Baseball (MLB),…
Inequality in human success may emerge through endogenous success-breeds-success dynamics but may also originate in pre-existing differences in talent. It is widely recognized that the skew in static frequency distributions of success…
An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…
A new model, which uses the frequency of individuals' annual home run totals, is employed to predict future home run totals and records in Major League Baseball. Complete home run frequency data from 1903--2005 is analyzed, resulting in…
Preference-based data often appear complex and noisy but may conceal underlying homogeneous structures. This paper introduces a novel framework of ranking structure recognition for preference-based data. We first develop an approach to…
The majority game, modelling a system of heterogeneous agents trying to behave in a similar way, is introduced and studied using methods of statistical mechanics. The stationary states of the game are given by the (local) minima of a…
We present evidence, based on play-by-play data from all 6087 games from the 2006/07--2009/10 seasons of the National Basketball Association (NBA), that basketball scoring is well described by a weakly-biased continuous-time random walk.…
Player performance prediction is a serious problem in every sport since it brings valuable future information for managers to make important decisions. In baseball industries, there already existed variable prediction systems and many types…
The field of quantitative analytics has transformed the world of sports over the last decade. To date, these analytic approaches are statistical at their core, characterizing what is and what was, while using this information to drive…
Major League Baseball (MLB) has a storied history of using statistics to better understand and discuss the game of baseball, with an entire discipline of statistics dedicated to the craft, known as sabermetrics. At their core, all…
In a wide class of paired comparisons, especially in the sports games, in which all subjects are divided into several groups, the intragroup comparisons are dense and the intergroup comparisons are sparse. Typical examples include the NFL…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
Ecologists and economists try to explain collective behavior in terms of competitive systems of selfish individuals with the ability to learn from the past. Statistical physicists have been investigating models which might contribute to the…
Matrix games constitute a fundamental problem of game theory and describe a situation of two players with completely conflicting interests. We show how methods from statistical mechanics can be used to investigate the statistical properties…
We study a stochastic process that mimics single-game elimination tournaments. In our model, the outcome of each match is stochastic: the weaker player wins with upset probability q<=1/2, and the stronger player wins with probability 1-q.…
With the development of measurement technology, data on the movements of actual games in various sports can be obtained and used for planning and evaluating the tactics and strategy. Defense in team sports is generally difficult to be…
We provide an algorithm with constant running time that given a weighted tournament $T$, distinguishes with high probability of success between the cases that $T$ can be represented by a Bradley--Terry model, or cannot even be approximated…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
We investigate uniformity properties of strategies. These properties involve sets of plays in order to express useful constraints on strategies that are not \mu-calculus definable. Typically, we can state that a strategy is…
In this work, we develop a graphical model to capture team dynamics. We analyze the model and show how to learn its parameters from data. Using our model we study the phenomenon of team collapse from a computational perspective. We use…