Related papers: Challenging nostalgia and performance metrics in b…
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…
We investigate a pool of international chess title holders born between 1901 and 1943. Using Elo ratings we compute for every player his expected score in a game with a randomly selected player from the pool. We use this figure as player's…
A common problem faced in statistical inference is drawing conclusions from paired comparisons, in which two objects compete and one is declared the victor. A probabilistic approach to such a problem is the Bradley-Terry model, first…
Runs Batted IN (RBI) records the number of runs a hitter directly drives in during their plate appearances and reflects a batter's ability to convert opportunities into scoring. Because producing runs determines game outcomes, RBI has long…
Systemic and idiosyncratic patterns in pitching mechanics of 24 top starting pitchers in Major League Baseball (MLB) are extracted and discovered from PITCHf/x database. These evolving patterns across different pitchers or seasons are…
This paper examines the historical dimension of gender bias in the US computing workforce. It offers new quantitative data on the computing workforce prior to the availability of US Census data in the 1970s. Computer user groups (including…
In recent years, analytics has started to revolutionize the game of basketball: quantitative analyses of the game inform team strategy, management of player health and fitness, and how teams draft, sign, and trade players. In this review,…
The idea that the success rate of a team increases when playing home is broadly accepted and documented for a wide variety of sports. Investigations on the so-called home advantage phenomenon date back to the 70's and every since has…
Market valuations for professional athletes is a difficult problem, given the amount of variability in performance and location from year to year. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), a straightforward way to address this problem…
It is challenging to get access to datasets related to the physical performance of soccer players. The teams consider such information highly confidential, especially if it covers in-game performance.Hence, most of the analysis and…
Estimating ballpark effects and team defense in baseball is challenging because batted-ball outcomes are influenced by multiple factors, including contact quality, ballpark environment, defensive performance, and random variation. In this…
Fantasy basketball has a rich underlying mathematical structure which makes optimal drafting strategy unclear. A central issue for category leagues is how to aggregate a player's statistics from all categories into a single number…
Many enthusiasts and experts publish forecasts of the order players are drafted into professional sports leagues, known as mock drafts. Using a novel dataset of mock drafts for the National Basketball Association (NBA), we analyze authors'…
There is a widespread notion in cricketing world that with increasing pace the performance of a bowler improves. Additionally, many commentators believe lower order batters to be more vulnerable to pace. The present study puts these two…
Assessing the relative merits of sportsmen and women whose careers took place far apart in time via a suitable statistical model is a complex task as any comparison is compromised by fundamental changes to the sport and society and often…
Fame, popularity and celebrity status, frequently used tokens of success, are often loosely related to, or even divorced from professional performance. This dichotomy is partly rooted in the difficulty to distinguish performance, an…
Measures of voting power have been the subject of extensive research since the mid 1940s. More recently, similar measures of relative importance have been studied in other domains that include inconsistent knowledge bases, intensity of…
Sports broadcasters inject drama into play-by-play commentary by building team and player narratives through subjective analyses and anecdotes. Prior studies based on small datasets and manual coding show that such theatrics evince…
Deep generative models are powerful tools that have produced impressive results in recent years. These advances have been for the most part empirically driven, making it essential that we use high quality evaluation metrics. In this paper,…
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…