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"The chance to win given a certain move" is an easily obtainable quantity from data and often quoted in gaming statistics. It is also the fundamental quantity that reinforcement learning AI bases on. Unfortunately, this conditional…
Credit scores are critical for allocating consumer debt in the United States, yet little evidence is available on their performance. We benchmark a widely used credit score against a machine learning model of consumer default and find…
In Major League Baseball, every ballpark is different, with different dimensions and climates. These differences make some ballparks more conducive to hitting home runs than others. Several factors conspire to make estimation of these…
We present a new way of estimation of the role of chance in achieving success, by comparing the empirical data from 100-meter dash competitions (one of the sports disciplines with the most stringent controls of external randomness), with…
Arrhythmia is an abnormality of the heart's rhythm, caused by problems in the conductive system and resulting in irregular heartbeats. There is increasing evidence that undertaking frequent endurance sports training elevates one's risk of…
Can one understand the statistics of wins and losses of baseball teams? Are their consecutive-game winning and losing streaks self-reinforcing or can they be described statistically? We apply the Bradley-Terry model, which incorporates the…
In scientific computing, it is common that a mathematical expression can be computed by many different algorithms (sometimes over hundreds), each identifying a specific sequence of library calls. Although mathematically equivalent, those…
With the aid of mathematical modelling (basic tool is the random walk with absorbing barriers) we derive subsequent formulas to study the effect of different versions of possible rules. For different rules the probability of winning a game,…
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…
In economy, markets are denoted as efficient when it is impossible to systematically generate profits which outperform the average. In the past years, the concept has been tested in other domains such as the growing sports betting market.…
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…
Quarterback performance can be difficult to rank, and much effort has been spent in creating new rating systems. However, the input statistics for such ratings are subject to randomness and factors outside the quarterback's control. To…
It's not unreasonable to think that in-game sporting performance can be affected partly by what takes place off the court. We can't observe what happens between games directly. Instead, we proxy for the possibility of athletes partying by…
Experience is an important asset in almost any professional activity. In basketball, there is believed to be a positive association between coaching experience and effective use of team timeouts. Here, we analyze both the extent to which a…
Fantasy Premier League (FPL) performance predictors tend to base their algorithms purely on historical statistical data. The main problems with this approach is that external factors such as injuries, managerial decisions and other…
For a balanced cardcounting system we study the random variable of the true count after a number of cards are removed from the remaining deck and we prove a close formula for its standard deviation. As expected, the formula shows that the…
Penalties are fraught and game-changing moments in soccer games that teams explicitly prepare for. Consequently, there has been substantial interest in analyzing them in order to provide advice to practitioners. From a data science…
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…
This manuscript is a statistical investigation into the 2017 Major League Baseball scandal involving the Houston Astros, the World Series championship winner that same year. The Astros were alleged to have stolen their opponents' pitching…
When predictions support decisions they may influence the outcome they aim to predict. We call such predictions performative; the prediction influences the target. Performativity is a well-studied phenomenon in policy-making that has so far…