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Sports betting's recent federal legalisation in the USA coincides with the golden age of machine learning. If bettors can leverage data to reliably predict the probability of an outcome, they can recognise when the bookmaker's odds are in…
Any sports competition needs a timetable, specifying when and where teams meet each other. The recent International Timetabling Competition (ITC2021) on sports timetabling showed that, although it is possible to develop general algorithms,…
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…
This paper develops metrics from a social network perspective that are directly translatable to the outcome of a basketball game. We extend a state-of-the-art multi-resolution stochastic process approach to modeling basketball by modeling…
During last years poker has gained a lot of prestige in several countries and, beyond to be one of the most famous card games, it represents a modern challenge for scientists belonging to different communities, spanning from artificial…
Resilience is the ability to positively respond to adversity. It has been studied in psychology for several decades, with focus on how individuals overcome traumata or cope with setbacks and obstacles in their professional career. Research…
Statistical modelling of sports data has become more and more popular in the recent years and different types of models have been proposed to achieve a variety of objectives: from identifying the key characteristics which lead a team to win…
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.…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
Our objective is to find the five best college sports coaches of past century for three different sports. We decided to look at men's basketball, football, and baseball. We wanted to use an approach that could definitively determine team…
In this study we focus on the prediction of basketball games in the Euroleague competition using machine learning modelling. The prediction is a binary classification problem, predicting whether a match finishes 1 (home win) or 2 (away…
In this paper, we employ machine learning techniques to analyze seventeen seasons (1999-2000 to 2015-2016) of NBA regular season data from every team to determine the common characteristics among NBA playoff teams. Each team was…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning the skill distribution of a population of agents from observations of pairwise games in a tournament. These games are played among randomly drawn agents from the population. The agents in our…
When facing a heavily-favored opponent, an underdog must be willing to assume greater-than-average risk. In statistical language, one would say that an underdog must be willing to adopt a strategy whose outcome has a larger-than-average…
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…
Scoring in a basketball game is a process highly dynamic and non-linear type. The level of NBA teams improve each season. They incorporate to their rosters the best players in the world. These and other mechanisms, make the scoring in the…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
This study applies complexity sciences to analyze the game of Padel. Data from 18 professional matches were collected, and the probability distributions of the total number of shots and the probability distribution of rallies' duration were…
We present evidence, based on play-by-play data from all 6087 games from the 2006/07--2009/10 seasons of the National Basketball Association (NBA), that basketball scoring is well described by a weakly-biased continuous-time random walk.…
We study statistics of the knockout tournament, where only the winner of a fixture progresses to the next. We assign a real number called competitiveness to each contestant and find that the resulting distribution of prize money follows a…