Related papers: Quantifying the relation between performance and s…
Computer-aided support and analysis are becoming increasingly important in the modern world of sports. The scouting of potential prospective players, performance as well as match analysis, and the monitoring of training programs rely more…
Performance prediction or forecasting sporting outcomes involves a great deal of insight into the particular area one is dealing with, and a considerable amount of intuition about the factors that bear on such outcomes and performances. The…
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…
The English Premier League is well-known for being not only one of the most popular professional sports leagues in the world, but also one of the toughest competitions to predict. The first purpose of this research was to verify the…
According to recent empirical studies, the group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw…
Soccer is one of the most popular sport worldwide, with live broadcasts frequently available for major matches. However, extracting detailed, frame-by-frame information on player actions from these videos remains a challenge. Utilizing…
Fame, popularity and celebrity status, frequently used tokens of success, are often loosely related to, or even divorced from professional performance. This dichotomy is partly rooted in the difficulty to distinguish performance, an…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
Computational Social Choice (ComSoc) is a rapidly developing field at the intersection of computer science, economics, social choice, and political science. The study of tournaments is fundamental to ComSoc and many results have been…
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…
Competitive balance is an important concept for professional sports and one of the key issues that European football has to address in order to ensure its long-term prosperity. However, the quantification of competitive balance is not an…
Forecast of football outcomes in terms of Home Win, Draw and Away Win relies largely on ex ante probability elicitation of these events and ex post verification of them via computation of probability scoring rules (Brier, Ranked…
Injuries have a great impact on professional soccer, due to their large influence on team performance and the considerable costs of rehabilitation for players. Existing studies in the literature provide just a preliminary understanding of…
A question is raised on whether some implied regularity or structure, as found in soccer team ranking by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), is due to implicit game result value or score competition conditions. The analysis…
Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
In this work, we draw attention to a connection between skill-based models of game outcomes and Gaussian process classification models. The Gaussian process perspective enables a) a principled way of dealing with uncertainty and b) rich…
We analyze the time series of soccer matches in a model-free way using data for the German soccer league (Bundesliga). We argue that the goal difference is a better measure for the overall fitness of a team than the number of points. It is…
Video content is present in an ever-increasing number of fields, both scientific and commercial. Sports, particularly soccer, is one of the industries that has invested the most in the field of video analytics, due to the massive popularity…
The outcome of some football matches has benefited both teams at the expense of a third team because head-to-head results were used for breaking ties. Inspired by these examples, our mathematical analysis identifies all possible collusion…
Tasks of different nature and difficulty levels are a part of people's lives. In this context, there is a scientific interest in the relationship between the difficulty of the task and the persistence need to accomplish it. Despite the…