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In a basketball game, scoring efficiency holds significant importance due to the numerous offensive possessions per game. Enhancing scoring efficiency necessitates effective collaboration among players with diverse playing styles. In…
Consider a 4-player version of Matching Pennies where a team of three players competes against the Devil. Each player simultaneously says "Heads" or "Tails". The team wins if all four choices match; otherwise the Devil wins. If all team…
The beautiful theory of statistical gambling, started by Dubins and Savage (for subfair games) and continued by Kelly and Breiman (for superfair games) has mostly been studied under the unrealistic assumption that we live in a continuous…
Previous work on fantasy basketball quantifies player value for category leagues without taking draft circumstances into account. Quantifying value in this way is convenient, but inherently limited as a strategy, because it precludes the…
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…
Thompson sampling provides a solution to bandit problems in which new observations are allocated to arms with the posterior probability that an arm is optimal. While sometimes easy to implement and asymptotically optimal, Thompson sampling…
We introduce the most comprehensive publicly available datasets for mixed doubles curling, constructed from eleven top-level tournaments from the CurlIT (https://curlit.com/results) Results Booklets spanning 53 countries, 1,112 games, and…
This work is prompted by the evidence of sharply peaked emission measure distributions in active stars, and by the claims of isothermal loops in solar coronal observations, at variance with the predictions of hydrostatic loop models with…
We comment on the paper of Murray, Browne, and McNicholas (2017), who proposed mixtures of skew distributions, which they termed hidden truncation hyperbolic (HTH). They recently made a clarification (Murray, Browne, McNicholas, 2019)…
In some athletic races, such as cycling and types of speed skating races, athletes have to complete a relatively long distance at a high speed in the presence of direct opponents. To win such a race, athletes are motivated to hide behind…
In this study, the stochastic properties of player and team ball possession times in professional football matches are examined. Data analysis shows that player possession time follows a gamma distribution and the player count of a team…
Professional baseball players are increasingly guaranteed expensive long-term contracts, with over 70 deals signed in excess of \$90 million, mostly in the last decade. These are substantial sums compared to a typical franchise valuation of…
For the problem of prediction with expert advice in the adversarial setting with finite stopping time, we give strong computer evidence that the comb strategy for $k=5$ experts is not asymptotically optimal, thereby giving strong evidence…
An integer $d$ is called a jumping champion for a given $x$ if $d$ is the most common gap between consecutive primes up to $x$. Occasionally several gaps are equally common. Hence, there can be more than one jumping champion for the same…
This paper studies the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem in the bandit framework in the canonical single-parameter exponential models. For this problem, many policies have been proposed, but most of them require solving…
A random walk-like model is considered to discuss statistical aspects of tournaments. The model is applied to soccer leagues with emphasis on the scores. This competitive system was computationally simulated and the results are compared…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used for stochastic multi-armed bandits, yet its inferential properties under adaptive data collection are subtle. Classical asymptotic theory for sample means can fail because arm-specific sample sizes are…
We formulate and study a two-player static duel game as a nonzero-sum discounted stochastic game. Players $P_{1},P_{2}$ are standing in place and, in each turn, one or both may shoot at the other player. If $P_{n}$ shoots at $P_{m}$ ($m\neq…
This paper presents a data-driven statistical framework to quantify the role of skill in games, addressing the long-standing question of whether success in a game is predominantly driven by skill or chance. We analyze player level data from…