Related papers: Identification of relevant performance indicators …
Competitive balance is the subject of much interest in the sports analytics literature and beyond. In this paper, we develop a statistical network model based on an extension of the stochastic block model to assess the balance between teams…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
Huge amounts of money are invested every year by football clubs on transfers. For both growth and survival, it is crucial for recruiting departments to make smart choices when targeting players. Therefore, it is very important to identify…
The recent framework of performative prediction is aimed at capturing settings where predictions influence the target/outcome they want to predict. In this paper, we introduce a natural multi-agent version of this framework, where multiple…
In the last years, scientific and industrial research has experienced a growing interest in acquiring large annotated data sets to train artificial intelligence algorithms for tackling problems in different domains. In this context, we have…
Composing a team of professional players is among the most crucial decisions in association football. Nevertheless, transfer market decisions are often based on myopic objectives and are questionable from a financial point of view. This…
Social contexts -- such as families, schools, and neighborhoods -- shape life outcomes. The key question is not simply whether they matter, but rather for whom and under what conditions. Here, we argue that prediction gaps -- differences in…
Probability forecasts are intended to account for the uncertainties inherent in forecasting. It is suggested that from an end-user's point of view probability is not necessarily sufficient to reflect uncertainties that are not simply the…
The availability of tracking data in football presents unique opportunities for analyzing team shape and player roles, but leveraging it effectively remains challenging. This difficulty arises from the significant overlap in player…
Prior work has provided strong evidence that, within organizational settings, teams that bring a diversity of information and perspectives to a task are more effective than teams that do not. If this form of informational diversity confers…
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…
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…
Information sharing between individuals is crucial to improve performance in collective tasks. However, in a competitive world, individuals may be reluctant to share information with the others, and it is still unclear how the presence of…
As algorithmic prediction systems have become widespread, fears that these systems may inadvertently discriminate against members of underrepresented populations have grown. With the goal of understanding fundamental principles that…
While PageRank has been extensively used to rank sport tournament participants (teams or individuals), its superiority over simpler ranking methods has been never clearly demonstrated. We use sports results from 18 major leagues to…
Over the last few decades, the player recruitment process in professional football has evolved into a multi-billion industry and has thus become of vital importance. To gain insights into the general level of their candidate reinforcements,…
We consider the problem of ranking a set of objects based on their performance when the measurement of said performance is subject to noise. In this scenario, the performance is measured repeatedly, resulting in a range of measurements for…
The information diffusion prediction on social networks aims to predict future recipients of a message, with practical applications in marketing and social media. While different prediction models all claim to perform well, general…
This article presents a holistic compound Poisson regression model framework to forecast number of corner kicks taken in association football. Corner kick taken events are often decisive in the match outcome and inherently arrive in batch…
In this paper, we present a novel approach for optimising long-term tactical and strategic decision-making in football (soccer) by encapsulating events in a league environment across a given time frame. We model the teams' objectives for a…