Related papers: Functional Ratings in Sports
Sports analytics -- broadly defined as the pursuit of improvement in athletic performance through the analysis of data -- has expanded its footprint both in the professional sports industry and in academia over the past 30 years. In this…
This study evaluates the effectiveness of the two-for-one strategy in basketball by applying a causal inference framework to play-by-play data from the 2018-19 and 2021-22 National Basketball Association regular seasons. Incorporating…
In the four major North American professional sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), the primary purpose of the regular season is to determine which teams most deserve to advance to the playoffs. Interestingly, while the…
For NCAA football, we provide a method for sports bettors to determine if they have a positive expected value bet based on the betting lines available to them and how they believe the game will end. The method we develop modifies…
Unlike other major professional sports, American football lacks comprehensive statistical ratings for player evaluation that are both reproducible and easily interpretable in terms of game outcomes. Existing methods for player evaluation in…
We explore a new way to evaluate generative models using insights from evaluation of competitive games between human players. We show experimentally that tournaments between generators and discriminators provide an effective way to evaluate…
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…
Regression-based adjusted plus-minus statistics were developed in basketball and have recently come to hockey. The purpose of these statistics is to provide an estimate of each player's contribution to his team, independent of the strength…
We present a novel representation of NBA players' shooting patterns based on Functional Data Analysis (FDA). Each player's charts of made and missed shots are treated as smooth functional data defined over a two-dimensional domain…
It is common to be interested in rankings or order relationships among entities. In complex settings where one does not directly measure a univariate statistic upon which to base ranks, such inferences typically rely on statistical models…
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…
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…
Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were…
This paper proposes a multiple-membership generalized linear mixed model for ranking college football teams using only their win/loss records. The model results in an intractable, high-dimensional integral due to the random effects…
Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
In this paper, market values of the football players in the forward positions are estimated using multiple linear regression by including the physical and performance factors in 2017-2018 season. Players from 4 major leagues of Europe are…
In this work we study the ranking algorithm used by F\'ed\'eration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA); we analyze the parameters it currently uses, show the formal probabilistic model from which it can be derived, and optimize…
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…
In this work, we present a methodology to estimate the strength of handball teams using a statistical method. We propose the use of the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson distribution to model the number of goals scored by a team as a flexible discrete…
In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…