Related papers: Optimising Game Tactics for Football
As a dedicated follower of sports statistics and with the MLB season beginning in late March, I set out to predict how many wins each team would accumulate by the end of the 162 game season. The goal was to build a simulation framework…
Two-player zero-sum repeated games are well understood. Computing the value of such a game is straightforward. Additionally, if the payoffs are dependent on a random state of the game known to one, both, or neither of the players, the…
One of the most important problems in system identification and statistics is how to estimate the unknown parameters of a given model. Optimization methods and specialized procedures, such as Empirical Minimization (EM) can be used in case…
We showcase in this paper the use of some tools from network theory to describe the strategy of football teams. Using passing data made available by FIFA during the 2010 World Cup, we construct for each team a weighted and directed network…
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…
In economy, markets are denoted as efficient when it is impossible to systematically generate profits which outperform the average. In the past years, the concept has been tested in other domains such as the growing sports betting market.…
We introduce a Bayesian mean-value approach for ranking all college football teams using only win-loss data. This approach is unique in that the prior distribution necessary to handle undefeated and winless teams is calculated…
Stochastic games are an important class of problems that generalize Markov decision processes to game theoretic scenarios. We consider finite state two-player zero-sum stochastic games over an infinite time horizon with discounted rewards.…
The majority game, modelling a system of heterogeneous agents trying to behave in a similar way, is introduced and studied using methods of statistical mechanics. The stationary states of the game are given by the (local) minima of a…
In the paper it is proven that the two-players turn-based stochastic game "Risk or Safety" has a unique solution. Both players need to play the same strategy if they want to maximize their winning chances. An analytical method based on the…
The most important factors which contribute to the efficiency of game-theoretical algorithms are time and game complexity. In this study, we have offered an elegant method to deal with high complexity of game theoretic multi-objective…
This work proposes a scheme that allows learning complex multi-agent behaviors in a sample efficient manner, applied to 2v2 soccer. The problem is formulated as a Markov game, and solved using deep reinforcement learning. We propose a basic…
The field of quantitative analytics has transformed the world of sports over the last decade. To date, these analytic approaches are statistical at their core, characterizing what is and what was, while using this information to drive…
Cricket betting is a multi-billion dollar market. Therefore, there is a strong incentive for models that can predict the outcomes of games and beat the odds provided by bookers. The aim of this study was to investigate to what degree it is…
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…
The approaches routinely used to model the outcomes of football matches are characterised by strong assumptions about the dependence between the number of goals scored by the two competing teams and their marginal distribution. In this…
Fantasy Premier League (FPL) performance predictors tend to base their algorithms purely on historical statistical data. The main problems with this approach is that external factors such as injuries, managerial decisions and other…
In online betting, the bookmaker can update the payoffs it offers on a particular event many times before the event takes place, and the updated payoffs may depend on the bets accumulated thus far. We study the problem of bookmaking with…
A good racing strategy and in particular the racing line is decisive to winning races in Formula 1, MotoGP, and other forms of motor racing. The racing line defines the path followed around a track as well as the optimal speed profile along…
We introduce the class of multistage stochastic optimization problems with a random number of stages. For such problems, we show how to write dynamic programming equations and detail the Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming algorithm to…