Related papers: An Analysis of Tournament Structure
Challenge the Champ is a simple tournament format, where an ordering of the players -- called a seeding -- is decided. The first player in this order is the initial champ, and faces the next player. The outcome of each match decides the…
A myriad of different data are generated to characterize a soccer match. Here we discuss which performance indicators are particularly helpful to forecast the future results of a team via an estimation of the underlying team strengths with…
In certain real-world optimization scenarios, practitioners are not interested in solving multiple problems but rather in finding the best solution to a single, specific problem. When the computational budget is large relative to the cost…
In evolutionary algorithms a critical parameter that must be tuned is that of selection pressure. If it is set too low then the rate of convergence towards the optimum is likely to be slow. Alternatively if the selection pressure is set too…
Niching methods have been developed to maintain the population diversity, to investigate many peaks in parallel and to reduce the effect of genetic drift. We present the first rigorous runtime analyses of restricted tournament selection…
In this work, we examine a generic class of simple distributed balls-into-bins algorithms. Exploiting the strong concentration bounds that apply to balls-into-bins games, we provide an iterative method to compute accurate estimates of the…
Based on known methods for computing the number of distinct score sequences for $n$-vertex tournaments, we develop algorithms for computing the number of distinct score sequences for self-complementary tournaments, strong tournaments, and…
The orienteering problem is a well-studied and fundamental problem in transportation science. In the problem, we are given a graph with prizes on the nodes and lengths on the edges, together with a budget on the overall tour length. The…
The success of lexicase selection has led to various extensions, including its combination with down-sampling, which further increased performance. However, recent work found that down-sampling also leads to significant improvements in the…
The group stage of a sports tournament is often made more appealing by introducing additional constraints in the group draw that promote an attractive and balanced group composition. For example, the number of intra-regional group matches…
Tournaments are widely used models to represent pairwise dominance between candidates, alternatives, or teams. We study the problem of providing certified explanations for why a candidate appears among the winners under various tournament…
Collaborative competitions have gained popularity in the scientific and technological fields. These competitions involve defining tasks, selecting evaluation scores, and devising result verification methods. In the standard scenario,…
Starting in the 2024/25 season, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has fundamentally changed the format of its club competitions: the group stage has been replaced by a league phase played by 36 teams in an incomplete round…
The community structure of a complex network can be determined by finding the partitioning of its nodes that maximizes modularity. Many of the proposed algorithms for doing this work by recursively bisecting the network. We show that this…
Scoring rules aggregate individual rankings by assigning some points to each position in each ranking such that the total sum of points provides the overall ranking of the alternatives. They are widely used in sports competitions consisting…
Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the…
In a multi-battle contest, each time a player competes by investing some of her budgets or resources in a component battle to collect a value if winning the battle. There are multiple battles to fight, and the budgets get consumed over…
The paper reviews some axioms of additivity concerning ranking methods used for generalized tournaments with possible missing values and multiple comparisons. It is shown that one of the most natural properties, called consistency, has…
The organizer of a machine learning competition faces the problem of maintaining an accurate leaderboard that faithfully represents the quality of the best submission of each competing team. What makes this estimation problem particularly…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…