Related papers: A Prediction Tournament Paradox
We demonstrate that the forecasting combination puzzle is a consequence of the methodology commonly used to produce forecast combinations. By the combination puzzle, we refer to the empirical finding that predictions formed by combining…
Performance prediction or forecasting sporting outcomes involves a great deal of insight into the particular area one is dealing with, and a considerable amount of intuition about the factors that bear on such outcomes and performances. The…
Various measures can be used to estimate bias or unfairness in a predictor. Previous work has already established that some of these measures are incompatible with each other. Here we show that, when groups differ in prevalence of the…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
In Newcomb's paradox you choose to receive either the contents of a particular closed box, or the contents of both that closed box and another one. Before you choose, a prediction algorithm deduces your choice, and fills the two boxes based…
It is often reported in forecast combination literature that a simple average of candidate forecasts is more robust than sophisticated combining methods. This phenomenon is usually referred to as the "forecast combination puzzle". Motivated…
The old adage says that it is better to be lucky than to be good, but when it comes to winning NCAA tournament pools, do you need to be both? This paper attempts to answer this question using data from the 2014 men's basketball tournament…
In each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result - a…
In public discussions of the quality of forecasts, attention typically focuses on the predictive performance in cases of extreme events. However, the restriction of conventional forecast evaluation methods to subsets of extreme observations…
We study a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where a large number of individuals choose the game they want to play by voting. We show that it can be better for the players to vote randomly than to vote according to their own…
The research area of algorithms with predictions has seen recent success showing how to incorporate machine learning into algorithm design to improve performance when the predictions are correct, while retaining worst-case guarantees when…
Cricket is unarguably one of the most popular sports in the world. Predicting the outcome of a cricket match has become a fundamental problem as we are advancing in the field of machine learning. Multiple researchers have tried to predict…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
We study statistics of the knockout tournament, where only the winner of a fixture progresses to the next. We assign a real number called competitiveness to each contestant and find that the resulting distribution of prize money follows a…
In 2000 Allen Schwenk, using a well-known mathematical model of matchplay tournaments in which the probability of one player beating another in a single match is fixed for each pair of players, showed that the classical single-elimination,…
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…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules for round-robin tournaments of $n$ competitors. Specifically, $n$ competitors are competing for a prize, and a tournament rule $r$ maps the result of all $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches…
Existing match classification models in the tournament design literature have two major limitations: a contestant is considered indifferent only if uncertain future results do never affect its prize, and competitive matches are not…
Prediction markets are useful for estimating probabilities of claims whose truth will be revealed at some fixed time -- this includes questions about the values of real-world events (i.e. statistical uncertainty), and questions about the…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…