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Ranking is used in sport leagues to determine a champion and/or to decide on promotion/relegation of teams. Arguably, the best known ranking method relies on scores obtained by cumulating the points associated with the wins and the draws of…
Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…
This paper proposes a model to predict the outcome of the March Madness tournament based on historical NCAA basketball data since 2013. The framework of this project is a simplification of the FiveThrityEight NCAA March Madness prediction…
With the development of measurement technology, data on the movements of actual games in various sports can be obtained and used for planning and evaluating the tactics and strategy. Defense in team sports is generally difficult to be…
Soccer attracts the attention of many researchers and professionals in the sports industry. Therefore, the incorporation of science into the sport is constantly growing, with increasing investments in performance analysis and sports…
In the sports of soccer, hockey and basketball the most commonly used statistics for player performance assessment are divided into two categories: offensive statistics and defensive statistics. However, qualitative assessments of…
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…
An overwhelming majority of humans are right-handed. Numerous explanations for individual handedness have been proposed, but this population-level handedness remains puzzling. Here we use a minimal mathematical model to explain this…
Streaks of success have always fascinated people and a lot of research has been conducted to identify whether the "hot hand" effect is real. While sports have provided an appropriate platform for studying this phenomenon, the majority of…
It is customary for researchers and practitioners to fit linear models in order to predict NBA player's salary based on the players' performance on court. On the contrary, we focus on the players salary share (with regards to the team…
Sports competitions are widely researched in computer and social science, with the goal of understanding how players act under uncertainty. While there is an abundance of computational work on player metrics prediction based on past…
We investigate the hot hand phenomenon using data on 110,513 free throws taken in the National Basketball Association (NBA). As free throws occur at unevenly spaced time points within a game, we consider a state-space model formulated in…
Do NFL teams make rational decisions? What factors potentially affect the probability of wining a game in NFL? How can a team come back from a demoralizing interception? In this study we begin by examining the hypothesis of rational…
In most professional sports, the structure of the environment is kept neutral so that scoring imbalances may be attributed to differences in team skill. It thus remains unknown what impact structural heterogeneities can have on scoring…
Predicting the results of soccer matches is of great interest. This is not only due to the popularity of the sport and the joy of private "betting rounds", but also due to the large sports betting market. Where previously expert knowledge…
National teams from different continents can play against each other only in afew sports competitions. Therefore, a reasonable aim is maximising the number of intercontinental games in world cups, as done in basketball and football, in…
Identifying combinations of players (that is, lineups) in basketball - and other sports - that perform well when they play together is one of the most important tasks in sports analytics. One of the main challenges associated with this task…
The draw of some knockout tournaments requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging with draw constraints: the two draw procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed…
An informal and elementary introduction to probability scoring and forecast verification and improvement, slightly extended from Significance 22:3(2025)16, which might be useful for less mathematical readers as a prologue to the classic…
Understanding the properties of games played under computational constraints remains challenging. For example, how do we expect rational (but computationally bounded) players to play games with a prohibitively large number of states, such…