Related papers: The problem of shot selection in basketball
The standard mathematical approach to fourth-down decision making in American football is to make the decision that maximizes estimated win probability. Win probability estimates arise from machine learning models fit from historical data.…
For some time, point-differential has been thought to be a better predictor for future NBA success than pure win-loss record. Most ranking and team performance predictions rely largely on point-differential, often with some normalizations…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
Probabilistic properties of tennis scoring systems are examined and compared with best-of-K systems. A model, where each player has his/her own probability of winning his/her service point and which remains invariant for the duration of the…
Previous work on fantasy basketball has established methods for optimizing team construction for head-to-head formats. This has been facilitated by the straightforwardness of calculating the objective function for those formats, given that…
Evaluating the overall ability of players in the National Hockey League (NHL) is a difficult task. Existing methods such as the famous "plus/minus" statistic have many shortcomings. Standard linear regression methods work well when player…
Fighting Fantasy is a popular recreational fantasy gaming system worldwide. Combat in this system progresses through a stochastic game involving a series of rounds, each of which may be won or lost. Each round, a limited resource (`luck')…
Identifying significant shots in a rally is important for evaluating players' performance in badminton matches. While there are several studies that have quantified player performance in other sports, analyzing badminton data is remained…
With the vast amount of data collected on football and the growth of computing abilities, many games involving decision choices can be optimized. The underlying rule is the maximization of an expected utility of outcomes and the law of…
Accuracy of throwing in games and sports is governed by how errors at projectile release are propagated by flight dynamics. To address the question of what governs the choice of throwing strategy, we use a simple model of throwing with an…
In machine learning tasks, especially in the tasks of prediction, scientists tend to rely solely on available historical data and disregard unproven insights, such as experts' opinions, polls, and betting odds. In this paper, we propose a…
One of the emerging trends for sports analytics is the growing use of player and ball tracking data. A parallel development is deep learning predictive approaches that use vast quantities of data with less reliance on feature engineering.…
Winning the coin toss at the end of a tied soccer game gives a team the right to choose whether to kick either first or second on all five rounds of penalty kicks, when each team is allowed one kick per round. There is considerable evidence…
Basketball players' performance measurement is of critical importance for a broad spectrum of decisions related to training and game strategy. Despite this recognized central role, the main part of the studies on this topic focus on…
Statistical analysis and modeling is becoming increasingly popular for the world's leading organizations, especially for professional NBA teams. Sophisticated methods and models of sport talent evaluation have been created for this purpose.…
We study a game where one player selects a random function, and the other has to guess that function, and show that with high probability the second player can correctly guess most of the random function. We apply this analysis to…
In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout)…
We study a sequential resource allocation problem between a fixed number of arms. On each iteration the algorithm distributes a resource among the arms in order to maximize the expected success rate. Allocating more of the resource to a…
It is common to be interested in rankings or order relationships among entities. In complex settings where one does not directly measure a univariate statistic upon which to base ranks, such inferences typically rely on statistical models…
We consider the following sample selection problem. We observe in an online fashion a sequence of samples, each endowed by a quality. Our goal is to either select or reject each sample, so as to maximize the aggregate quality of the…