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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…
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…
The existence and justification to the home advantage -- the benefit a sports team receives when playing at home -- has been studied across sport. The majority of research on this topic is limited to individual leagues in short time frames,…
In this paper, we present a new model for ranking sports teams. Our model uses all scoring data from all games to produce a functional rating by the method of least squares. The functional rating can be interpreted as a teams average point…
Two new Bayesian methods for estimating and predicting in-game home team win probabilities are proposed. The first method has a prior that adjusts as a function of lead differential and time elapsed. The second is an adjusted version of the…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
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.…
The main objective of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the margin of victory can be predicted solely by the rankings of the opposing teams in NCAA Division I men's basketball games. Several past studies have modeled this…
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…
In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
Implicit biases occur automatically and unintentionally and are particularly present when we have to make split second decisions. One such situations appears in refereeing, where referees have to make an instantaneous decision on a…
Existing approaches for estimating home-field advantage (HFA) include modeling the difference between home and away scores as a function of the difference between home and away team ratings that are treated either as fixed or random…
Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport…
We analyze how coaching strategies affect goal difference and home win probabilities using hand-coded Serie A match commentary (2011/12--2013/14). Our dataset captures in-game dynamics, referee actions, and team behavior. Applying…
The 2020 NBA playoffs were played inside of a bubble in Disney World because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant that there were no fans in attendance, games played on neutral courts and no traveling for teams, which in theory removes…
Motivated by the goal of evaluating real-time forecasts of home team win probabilities in the National Basketball Association, we develop new tools for measuring the quality of continuously updated probabilistic forecasts. This includes…
Hiring a head coach of a college sports team is vital which will definitely have a great influence on the later development of the team. However, a lot of attention has been focused on each coach's individual features. A systematic and…
The massive growth of sports videos has resulted in a need for automatic generation of sports highlights that are comparable in quality to the hand-edited highlights produced by broadcasters such as ESPN. Unlike previous works that mostly…
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…