Related papers: Rao-Blackwellizing Field Goal Percentage
Even though it might have taken some time, the three-point line ultimately changed the way the game is played as evidenced by the increase in the three-point shot attempts over the years. However, during the last few years we have…
Measuring soccer shooting skill is a challenging analytics problem due to the scarcity and highly contextual nature of scoring events. The introduction of more advanced data surrounding soccer shots has given rise to model-based metrics…
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…
The underlying physics of basketball shooting seems to be a straightforward example of the Newtonian mechanics that can easily be traced by numerical methods. However, a human basketball player does not make use of all the possible…
Traditional NBA player evaluation metrics are based on scoring differential or some pace-adjusted linear combination of box score statistics like points, rebounds, assists, etc. These measures treat performances with the outcome of the game…
Box score statistics in the National Basketball Association are used to measure and evaluate player performance. Some of these statistics are subjective in nature and since box score statistics are recorded by scorekeepers hired by the home…
Expected goals (xG) models estimate the probability that a shot results in a goal from its context (e.g., location, pressure), but they operate only on observed shots. We propose xG+, a possession-level framework that first estimates the…
Standard measures of batting performance such as a batting average and an on-base percentage can be decomposed into component rates such as strikeout rates and home run rates. The likelihood of hitting data for a group of players can be…
Understanding player shooting profiles is an essential part of basketball analysis: knowing where certain opposing players like to shoot from can help coaches neutralize offensive gameplans from their opponents; understanding where their…
In this paper, we predict the likelihood of a player making a shot in basketball from multiagent trajectories. Previous approaches to similar problems center on hand-crafting features to capture domain specific knowledge. Although…
A hockey player's plus-minus measures the difference between goals scored by and against that player's team while the player was on the ice. This measures only a marginal effect, failing to account for the influence of the others he is…
In this work we develop a new algorithm for rating of teams (or players) in one-on-one games by exploiting the observed difference of the game-points (such as goals), also known as a margin of victory (MOV). Our objective is to obtain the…
This paper introduces a new model and methodology for estimating the ability of NBA players. The main idea is to directly measure how good a player is by comparing how their team performs when they are on the court as opposed to when they…
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.…
In this paper, we develop a logistic regression model to estimate the probability that a particular shot in an NHL game will result in a goal, and use the results to evaluate the performance of NHL skaters, goalies, and teams. We weight…
Although basketball is a dualistic sport, with all players competing on both offense and defense, almost all of the sport's conventional metrics are designed to summarize offensive play. As a result, player valuations are largely based on…
The concept of Rao-Blackwellization is employed to improve predictions of artificial neural networks by physical information. The error norm and the proof of improvement are transferred from the original statistical concept to a…
Efficient inference is often possible in a streaming context using Rao-Blackwellized particle filters (RBPFs), which exactly solve inference problems when possible and fall back on sampling approximations when necessary. While RBPFs can be…
The expected goal provides a more representative measure of the team and player performance which also suit the low-scoring nature of football instead of score in modern football. The score of a match involves randomness and often may not…
In professional basketball, the accurate prediction of scoring opportunities based on strategic decision-making is crucial for spatial and player evaluations. However, traditional models often face challenges in accounting for the…