Related papers: Luck is Hard to Beat: The Difficulty of Sports Pre…
In baseball, a scouting report profiles a player's characteristics and traits, usually intended for use in player valuation. This work presents a first-of-its-kind dataset of almost 10,000 scouting reports for minor league, international,…
Luck is considered to be a crucial ingredient to achieve impact in all creative domains, despite their diversity. For instance, in science, the movie industry, music, and art, the occurrence of the highest impact work and of a hot streak…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
We propose a Statistically Enhanced Learning (aka. SEL) model to predict handball games. Our Machine Learning model augmented with SEL features outperforms state-of-the-art models with an accuracy beyond 80%. In this work, we show how we…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
Gauging an individual's skill level is crucial, as it inherently shapes their behavior. Quantifying skill, however, is challenging because it is latent to the observed actions. To explore skill understanding in human behavior, we focus on…
Forecasting the number of Olympic medals for each nation is highly relevant for different stakeholders: Ex ante, sports betting companies can determine the odds while sponsors and media companies can allocate their resources to promising…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules which map the results of $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches and select a winner. Prior work designs simple tournament rules such that no pair of teams can manipulate the outcome of their match…
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…
This manuscript is focused on features' definition for the outcome prediction of matches of NBA basketball championship. It is shown how models based on one a single feature (Elo rating or the relative victory frequency) have a quality of…
Elite football is believed to have evolved in recent years, yet systematic evidence for the pace and form of that change remains sparse. Drawing on event-level records for 13,018 matches across ten top-tier men's and women's leagues in…
Tournaments can be used to model a variety of practical scenarios including sports competitions and elections. A natural notion of strength of alternatives in a tournament is a generalized king: an alternative is said to be a $k$-king if it…
The demand for global university league tables has been high over the past two decades. However, significant criticism of their methodologies is accumulating without being addressed. I revisit global university league tables by normalizing…
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…
Network structure and its role in prediction are examined in competitive basketball at the team and player levels. Adversarial game outcome networks from NCAA Division I women's basketball from 2021 to 2024 are used to compute the common…
We investigated the temporal distribution of goals in soccer using event-level data from 3,433 matches across 21 leagues and competitions. Contrary to the prevailing notion of randomness, we found that the probability of a goal being scored…
A new approach in team sports analysis consists in studying positioning and movements of players during the game in relation to team performance. State of the art tracking systems produce spatio-temporal traces of players that have…
We build a general theory for characterizing the computational complexity of motion planning of robot(s) through a graph of "gadgets", where each gadget has its own state defining a set of allowed traversals which in turn modify the…
For some time, point-differential has been thought to be a better predictor for future NBA success than pure win-loss record. Most ranking and team performance predictions rely largely on point-differential, often with some normalizations…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…