Related papers: Inferring Team Strengths Using a Discrete Markov R…
Discrete Markov random fields form a natural class of models to represent images and spatial data sets. The use of such models is, however, hampered by a computationally intractable normalising constant. This makes parameter estimation and…
Anticipating defensive coverage schemes is a crucial yet challenging task for offenses in American football. Because defenders' assignments are intentionally disguised before the snap, they remain difficult to recognize in real time. To…
Discrete Markov random fields are undirected graphical models that capture complex conditional dependencies between discrete variables. Conducting exact posterior inference in these models is often computationally challenging because…
In Major League Baseball, strategy and planning are major factors in determining the outcome of a game. Previous studies have aided this by building machine learning models for predicting the winning team of any given game. We extend this…
Technological advances have paved the way for collecting high-resolution network data in basketball, football, and other team-based sports. Such data consist of interactions among players of competing teams indexed by space and time.…
We consider the task of determining a football player's ability for a given event type, for example, scoring a goal. We propose an interpretable Bayesian model which is fit using variational inference methods. We implement a Poisson model…
We consider learning a sparse pairwise Markov Random Field (MRF) with continuous-valued variables from i.i.d samples. We adapt the algorithm of Vuffray et al. (2019) to this setting and provide finite-sample analysis revealing sample…
Team-based invasion sports such as football, basketball and hockey are similar in the sense that the players are able to move freely around the playing area; and that player and team performance cannot be fully analysed without considering…
This work studies discrete-time discounted Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces and addresses the inverse problem of inferring a cost function from observed optimal behavior. We first consider the case in which…
Technology has had an unquestionable impact on the way people watch sports. Along with this technological evolution has come a higher standard to ensure a good viewing experience for the casual sports fan. It can be argued that the…
The approaches routinely used to model the outcomes of football matches are characterised by strong assumptions about the dependence between the number of goals scored by the two competing teams and their marginal distribution. In this…
Understanding how individual traits influence team performance is valuable, but these traits are not always directly observable. Prior research has inferred traits like trust from behavioral data. We analyze conversational data to identify…
This work studies the problem of ad hoc teamwork in teams composed of agents with differing computational capabilities. We consider cooperative multi-player games in which each agent's policy is constrained by a private capability…
Goals are results of pin-point shots and it is a pivotal decision in soccer when, how and where to shoot. The main contribution of this study is two-fold. At first, after showing that there exists high spatial correlation in the data of…
We present a fully convolutional neural network architecture that is capable of estimating full probability surfaces of potential passes in soccer, derived from high-frequency spatiotemporal data. The network receives layers of low-level…
The recent growth in data availability in football has increased the risk of incorrect use of data-driven models, making guidelines on their validation and application necessary. The Expected Threat (xT) model is an accessible option for…
The non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…
We use the Markov chain approximation method to construct approximations for the solution of the mean field game (MFG) with reflecting barriers studied in Bayraktar, Budhiraja, and Cohen (2017). The MFG is formulated in terms of a…
This study explores the relationship between the performance of a football team and the topological parameters of temporal passing networks. To achieve this, we propose a method to identify moments of high and low team performance based on…
Markov random fields area popular model for high-dimensional probability distributions. Over the years, many mathematical, statistical and algorithmic problems on them have been studied. Until recently, the only known algorithms for…