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In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
The analysis of income and wealth inequality is often constrained by the lack of reliable data. In this work, we introduce a proxy-based approach in which sports performance data are used to mimic economic distributions. In particular, 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…
Fantasy Premier League (FPL) performance predictors tend to base their algorithms purely on historical statistical data. The main problems with this approach is that external factors such as injuries, managerial decisions and other…
A commonly held opinion is that left-handed tennis players are overrepresented compared to the percentage of left-handers within the general population. This study provides the domain insights supported by data analysis that could help…
In the domain of Sport Analytics, Global Positioning Systems devices are intensively used as they permit to retrieve players' movements. Team sports' managers and coaches are interested on the relation between players' patterns of movements…
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…
The problem of evaluating the performance of soccer players is attracting the interest of many companies and the scientific community, thanks to the availability of massive data capturing all the events generated during a match (e.g.,…
We investigate the properties of the James function, associated with Bill James's so-called "log5 method," which assigns a probability to the result of a game between two teams based on their respective winning percentages. We also…
Assessing the impact of the individual actions performed by soccer players during games is a crucial aspect of the player recruitment process. Unfortunately, most traditional metrics fall short in addressing this task as they either focus…
Increased data availability has stimulated the interest in studying sports prediction problems via analytical approaches; in particular, with machine learning and simulation. We characterize several models that have been proposed in the…
Evaluating a soccer player's performance can be challenging due to the high costs and small margins involved in recruitment decisions. Raw observational statistics further complicate an accurate individual skill assessment as they do not…
Most historical National Football League (NFL) analysis, both mainstream and academic, has relied on public, play-level data to generate team and player comparisons. Given the number of oft omitted variables that impact on-field results,…
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 studies the relations between agent performances and their intellective abilities in mix-games in which there are two groups of agents: one group plays a minority game, and the other plays a majority game. These two groups have…
Cricket, "a Gentleman's Game", is a prominent sport rising worldwide. Due to the rising competitiveness of the sport, players and team management have become more professional with their approach. Prior studies predicted individual…
Tracking the ball is critical for video-based analysis of team sports. However, it is difficult, especially in low-resolution images, due to the small size of the ball, its speed that creates motion blur, and its often being occluded by…
In 2024, Major League Baseball released new bat tracking data, reporting swing-by-swing bat speed and swing length measured at the point of contact. While exciting, the data present challenges for their interpretation. The timing of the…
We consider two-player games played over finite state spaces for an infinite number of rounds. At each state, the players simultaneously choose moves; the moves determine a successor state. It is often advantageous for players to choose…
Though athletics statistics are abundant, it is a difficult task to quantitatively compare performances from different events of track, field, and road running in a meaningful way. There are several commonly-used methods, but each has its…