Related papers: Soccer: is scoring goals a predictable Poissonian …
Machine learning models have become increasingly popular for predicting the results of soccer matches, however, the lack of publicly-available benchmark datasets has made model evaluation challenging. The 2023 Soccer Prediction Challenge…
Though athletics statistics are abundant, it is a difficult task to quantitatively compare performances from different events of track, field, and road running in a meaningful way. There are several commonly-used methods, but each has its…
In fantasy sports, strategic thinking-not mere luck-often defines who wins and who falls short. As fantasy cricket grows in popularity across India, understanding whether success stems from skill or chance has become both an analytical and…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
While conformal predictors reap the benefits of rigorous statistical guarantees on their error frequency, the size of their corresponding prediction sets is critical to their practical utility. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of…
Results in contact sports like Rugby are mainly interpreted in terms of the ability and/or luck of teams. But this neglects the important role of the {\em motivation} of players, reflected in the effort exerted in the game. Here we present…
Twitter has been proven to be a notable source for predictive modelling on various domains such as the stock market, the dissemination of diseases or sports outcomes. However, such a study has not been conducted in football (soccer) so far.…
In fluid team sports such as soccer and basketball, analyzing team formation is one of the most intuitive ways to understand tactics from domain participants' point of view. However, existing approaches either assume that team formation is…
Under very general conditions the hitting time of a set by a stochastic process is a stopping time. We give a new simple proof of this fact. The section theorems for optional and predictable sets are easy corollaries of the proof.
Conventional noncooperative game theory hypothesizes that the joint strategy of a set of players in a game must satisfy an "equilibrium concept". All other joint strategies are considered impossible; the only issue is what equilibrium…
On the occasion of the last FIFA World Cup in Brazil, The Economist published a plot depicting how many goals have been scored in all World Cup competitions until present, minute by minute. The plot was followed by a naive and poorly…
Several performance metrics for quantifying the in-game performances of individual football players have been proposed in recent years. Although the majority of the on-the-ball actions during games constitutes of passes, many of the…
Thousands of experiments are analyzed and papers are published each year involving the statistical analysis of grouped data. While this area of statistics is often perceived -- somewhat naively -- as saturated, several misconceptions still…
Volleyball is a team sport with unique and specific characteristics. We introduce a new two level-hierarchical Bayesian model which accounts for theses volleyball specific characteristics. In the first level, we model the set outcome with a…
We propose a statistical framework for quantifying the importance of single events that do not provide intermediate rewards but offer implicit incentives through the reward structure at the end of a multi-event contest. Applying the…
Predicting the outcomes of future events is a challenging problem for which a variety of solution methods have been explored and attempted. We present an empirical comparison of a variety of online and offline adaptive algorithms for…
Existing match classification models in the tournament design literature have two major limitations: a contestant is considered indifferent only if uncertain future results do never affect its prize, and competitive matches are not…
An open problem posed by the first author is the complexity to decide whether a sequence of nonnegative integer numbers can be the final score of a football tournament. In this paper we propose polynomial time approximate and exponential…
Corner kicks are an important event in soccer because they are often the result of strong attacking play and can be of keen interest to sports fans and bettors. Peng, Hu, and Swartz (2024, Computational Statistics) formulate the mixture…
Probabilistic modeling is an effective tool for evaluating team performance and predicting outcomes in sports. However, an important question that hasn't been fully explored is whether these models can reliably reflect actual performance…