Related papers: Improving upon NBA point-differential rankings
This study outlines a light gradient boosted model aimed at predicting shot outcomes in the NHL. The model uses the NHL's spatiotemporal data to account for both the skill of shooters and goaltenders. This approach involves isolating and…
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…
A new class of general exponential ranking models is introduced which we label angle-based models for ranking data. A consensus score vector is assumed, which assigns scores to a set of items, where the scores reflect a consensus view of…
As 3-point shooting in the NBA continues to increase, the importance of perimeter defense has never been greater. Perimeter defenders are often evaluated by their ability to tightly contest shots, but how exactly does contesting a jump shot…
Many real-world optimization problems contain parameters that are unknown before deployment time, either due to stochasticity or to lack of information (e.g., demand or travel times in delivery problems). A common strategy in such cases is…
Many problems involve the use of models which learn probability distributions or incorporate randomness in some way. In such problems, because computing the true expected gradient may be intractable, a gradient estimator is used to update…
I address the difficult challenge of measuring the relative influence of competing basketball game strategies, and I apply my analysis to plays resulting in three-point shots. I use a glut of SportVU player tracking data from over 600 NBA…
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.…
Faced with data-driven policies, individuals will manipulate their features to obtain favorable decisions. While earlier works cast these manipulations as undesirable gaming, recent works have adopted a more nuanced causal framing in which…
Data analytics in sports is crucial to evaluate the performance of single players and the whole team. The literature proposes a number of tools for both offence and defence scenarios. Data coming from tracking location of players, in this…
Stochastic optimization algorithms have been successfully applied in several domains to find optimal solutions. Because of the ever-growing complexity of the integrated systems, novel stochastic algorithms are being proposed, which makes…
Graded labels are ubiquitous in real-world learning-to-rank applications, especially in human rated relevance data. Traditional learning-to-rank techniques aim to optimize the ranked order of documents. They typically, however, ignore…
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…
This paper presents CourtMotion, a spatiotemporal modeling framework for analyzing and predicting game events and plays as they develop in professional basketball. Anticipating basketball events requires understanding both physical motion…
In the last years decision-focused learning framework, also known as predict-and-optimize, have received increasing attention. In this setting, the predictions of a machine learning model are used as estimated cost coefficients in the…
Probabilistic properties of tennis scoring systems are examined and compared with best-of-K systems. A model, where each player has his/her own probability of winning his/her service point and which remains invariant for the duration of the…
In sports, there is a constant effort to improve metrics which assess player ability, but there has been almost no effort to quantify and compare existing metrics. Any individual making a management, coaching, or gambling decision is…
NBA team managers and owners try to acquire high-performing players. An important consideration in these decisions is how well the new players will perform in combination with their teammates. Our objective is to identify elite five-person…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
A computational revolution unleashed the power of artificial neural networks. At the heart of that revolution is automatic differentiation, which calculates the derivative of a performance measure relative to a large number of parameters.…