Related papers: Basketball scoring in NBA games: an example of com…
This study evaluates the effectiveness of the two-for-one strategy in basketball by applying a causal inference framework to play-by-play data from the 2018-19 and 2021-22 National Basketball Association regular seasons. Incorporating…
We examine whether social data can be used to predict how members of Major League Baseball (MLB) and members of the National Basketball Association (NBA) transition between teams during their career. We find that incorporating social data…
Recording of events in National Hockey League rinks is done through the Real Time Scoring System. This system records events such as hits, shots, faceoffs, etc., as part of the play-by-play files that are made publicly available. Several…
Modern basketball is all about creating efficient shots, that is, shots with high payoff. This is not necessarily equivalent to creating looks with the highest probability of success. In particular, the two most efficient shots in the NBA -…
From sports to science, the recent availability of large-scale data has allowed to gain insights on the drivers of human innovation and success in a variety of domains. Here we quantify human performance in the popular game of chess by…
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…
Moves in chess games are usually analyzed on a case-by-case basis by professional players, but thanks to the availability of large game databases, we can envision another approach of the game. Here, we indeed adopt a very different point of…
Understanding user dynamics in online communities has become an active research topic and can provide valuable insights for human behavior analysis and community management. In this work, we investigate the "bandwagon fan" phenomenon, a…
The use of statistical modeling in baseball has received substantial attention recently in both the media and academic community. We focus on a relatively under-explored topic: the use of statistical models for the analysis of fielding…
In this article, we study the dynamics of marking in football matches. To do this, we surveyed and analyzed a database containing the trajectories of players from both teams on the field of play during three professional games. We describe…
Individual sports competitions provide a natural setting for examining the relative importance of talent and luck/chance in achieving success. The belief that success is primarily due to individual abilities and hard work rather than…
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…
A way of finding interesting or exceptional records from instant-stamped temporal data is to consider their "durability," or, intuitively speaking, how well they compare with other records that arrived earlier or later, and how long they…
Sports analytics -- broadly defined as the pursuit of improvement in athletic performance through the analysis of data -- has expanded its footprint both in the professional sports industry and in academia over the past 30 years. In this…
Computer vision and video understanding have transformed sports analytics by enabling large-scale, automated analysis of game dynamics from broadcast footage. Despite significant advances in player and ball tracking, pose estimation, action…
How much is an on-ball screen worth? How much is a backdoor cut away from the ball worth? Basketball is one of a number of sports which, within the past decade, have seen an explosion in quantitative metrics and methods for evaluating…
The main objective of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the margin of victory can be predicted solely by the rankings of the opposing teams in NCAA Division I men's basketball games. Several past studies have modeled this…
We study adaptive learning in a typical p-player game. The payoffs of the games are randomly generated and then held fixed. The strategies of the players evolve through time as the players learn. The trajectories in the strategy space…
In this paper, we develop a group learning approach to analyze the underlying heterogeneity structure of shot selection among professional basketball players in the NBA. We propose a mixture of finite mixtures (MFM) model to capture the…
We propose a Bayesian nonparametric matrix clustering approach to analyze the latent heterogeneity structure in the shot selection data collected from professional basketball players in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The…