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This study outlines a light gradient boosted model aimed at predicting shot outcomes in the NHL. The model uses the NHL's spatiotemporal data to account for both the skill of shooters and goaltenders. This approach involves isolating and…
A checkers-like model game with a simplified set of rules is studied through extensive simulations of agents with different expertise and strategies. The introduction of complementary strategies, in a quite general way, provides a tool to…
Benchmark hacking refers to tuning a machine learning model to score highly on certain evaluation criteria without improving true generalization or faithfully solving the intended problem. We study this phenomenon in a generic machine…
This paper develops metrics from a social network perspective that are directly translatable to the outcome of a basketball game. We extend a state-of-the-art multi-resolution stochastic process approach to modeling basketball by modeling…
What factors contribute to the success of national teams in the Men's Ice Hockey World Championships and the Men's Ice Hockey World Junior Championships? This study examines whether hosting the tournament provides a home advantage; the…
Numerous statistics have been proposed for the measure of offensive ability in major league baseball. While some of these measures may offer moderate predictive power in certain situations, it is unclear which simple offensive metrics are…
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…
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…
In this paper we model basketball plays as episodes from team-specific non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs) with shot clock dependent transition probabilities. Bayesian hierarchical models are employed in the modeling and…
Sports organizations often want to estimate athlete strengths. For games with scored outcomes, a common approach is to assume observed game scores follow a normal distribution conditional on athletes' latent abilities, which may change over…
This paper studies partially observable two-person zero-sum semi-Markov games under a probability criterion, in which the system state may not be completely observed. It focuses on the probability that the accumulated rewards of player 1…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
Throughout the analytical revolution that has occurred in the NBA, the development of specific metrics and formulas has given teams, coaches, and players a new way to see the game. However - the question arises - how can we verify any…
Comparison data arises in many important contexts, e.g. shopping, web clicks, or sports competitions. Typically we are given a dataset of comparisons and wish to train a model to make predictions about the outcome of unseen comparisons. In…
This paper presents a novel framework for evaluating players in association football (soccer). Our method uses possession sequences, i.e. sequences of consecutive on-ball actions, for deriving estimates for player strengths. On the surface,…
Most models of Stackelberg security games assume that the attacker only knows the defender's mixed strategy, but is not able to observe (even partially) the instantiated pure strategy. Such partial observation of the deployed pure strategy…
The impact of player age on performance has received attention across sport. Most research has focused on the performance of players at each age, ignoring the reality that age likewise influences which players receive opportunities to…
League of Legends (LoL) has been a dominant esport for a decade, yet the inherent complexity of the game has stymied the creation of analytical measures of player skill and performance. Current industry standards are limited to…
This paper studies competitions with rank-based reward among a large number of teams. Within each sizable team, we consider a mean-field contribution game in which each team member contributes to the jump intensity of a common Poisson…
In this paper, we propose a shot percentage distribution strategy among the players of a basketball team to maximize the score that can be achieved by them. The approach is based on the concepts of game theory related to network flow.