Related papers: Time-based analysis of the NBA hot hand fallacy
Hot streaks dominate the main impact of creative careers. Despite their ubiquitous nature across a wide range of creative domains, it remains unclear if there is any regularity underlying the beginning of hot streaks. Here, we develop…
Ball lightning is a very rarely observed phenomenon that makes it extremely difficult to characterize scientifically. Eye-witness accounts of ball lightning that describe many features in common have been variously recorded for centuries.…
Evaluating the overall ability of players in the National Hockey League (NHL) is a difficult task. Existing methods such as the famous "plus/minus" statistic have many shortcomings. Standard linear regression methods work well when player…
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…
Basketball shooting coaches agree that smoother shooting motions are better, but there is less agreement about what "smooth" means quantitatively or what part of the shooting motion needs to be smooth. Using ball tracking data from the…
There has been a consistent criticism over the past decade of the NFL franchise tag's monetary limitations due to its biased institutions in favor of the team rather than the player. But the question whether the NFL's franchise tag is fair…
In this paper, we develop a group learning approach to analyze the underlying heterogeneity structure of shot selection among professional basketball players in the NBA. We propose a mixture of finite mixtures (MFM) model to capture the…
In this paper, we propose two novel basketball metrics: ``expected points'' for team-based comparisons and ``expected points above average (EPAA)'' as a player-evaluation tool. Established within the Bayesian hierarchical model framework,…
In the multiarmed bandit problem a gambler chooses an arm of a slot machine to pull considering a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We study the stochastic bandit problem where each arm has a reward distribution supported in a…
The underlying physics of basketball shooting seems to be a straightforward example of the Newtonian mechanics that can easily be traced by numerical methods. However, a human basketball player does not make use of all the possible…
In a function that takes its inputs from various players, the effect of a player measures the variation he can cause in the expectation of that function. In this paper we prove a tight upper bound on the number of players with large effect,…
Team-based invasion sports such as football, basketball and hockey are similar in the sense that the players are able to move freely around the playing area; and that player and team performance cannot be fully analysed without considering…
In the sports of soccer, hockey and basketball the most commonly used statistics for player performance assessment are divided into two categories: offensive statistics and defensive statistics. However, qualitative assessments of…
Batting average is one of the principle performance measures for an individual baseball player. It is natural to statistically model this as a binomial-variable proportion, with a given (observed) number of qualifying attempts (called…
The use of statistical modeling in baseball has received substantial attention recently in both the media and academic community. We focus on a relatively under-explored topic: the use of statistical models for the analysis of fielding…
This study focuses on the rotation of the hips and shoulders during a baseball bat swing, analyzing the time-series changes in rotational angles, rotational velocities, and axes using marker position data obtained from a motion capture…
Value functions are used in sports applications to determine the optimal action players should employ. However, most literature implicitly assumes that the player can perform the prescribed action with known and fixed probability of…
In this paper, Poisson time series models are considered to describe the number of field goals made by a basketball team or player at both the game (within-season) and the minute (within-game) level. To deal with the existence of temporal…
One of the emerging trends for sports analytics is the growing use of player and ball tracking data. A parallel development is deep learning predictive approaches that use vast quantities of data with less reliance on feature engineering.…
This paper considers the impact of unforced errors in sport. Although the proposed methods are applicable to various sports, we demonstrate the approach in the context of professional tennis. The value of the approach is that we can provide…