Related papers: Same-Score Streaks: A Case Study in Probability Mo…
Streaks of success have always fascinated people and a lot of research has been conducted to identify whether the "hot hand" effect is real. While sports have provided an appropriate platform for studying this phenomenon, the majority of…
Baseball is a game of strategic decisions including bullpen usage, pinch-hitting and intentional walks. Managers must adjust their strategies based on the changing state of the game in order to give their team the best chance of winning. In…
Sports are spontaneous generators of stories. Through skill and chance, the script of each game is dynamically written in real time by players acting out possible trajectories allowed by a sport's rules. By properly characterizing a given…
Increased data availability has stimulated the interest in studying sports prediction problems via analytical approaches; in particular, with machine learning and simulation. We characterize several models that have been proposed in the…
We introduce a three-step framework to determine at which pitches Major League batters should swing. Unlike traditional plate discipline metrics, which implicitly assume that all batters should always swing at (resp. take) pitches inside…
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…
This paper develops metrics from a social network perspective that are directly translatable to the outcome of a basketball game. We extend a state-of-the-art multi-resolution stochastic process approach to modeling basketball by modeling…
In the game of cricket, the result of coin toss is assumed to be one of the determinants of match outcome. The decision to bat first after winning the toss is often taken to make the best use of superior pitch conditions and set a big…
Player performance prediction is a serious problem in every sport since it brings valuable future information for managers to make important decisions. In baseball industries, there already existed variable prediction systems and many types…
In Major League Baseball, strategy and planning are major factors in determining the outcome of a game. Previous studies have aided this by building machine learning models for predicting the winning team of any given game. We extend this…
We investigate the time evolution of lead changes within individual games of competitive team sports. Exploiting ideas from the theory of random walks, the number of lead changes within a single game follows a Gaussian distribution. We show…
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…
In most popular sports leagues, like the MLB, NBA, and NFL, none of the commonly used statistics take into account the strengths of the opponents a player faces. One of the main reasons for this is the conventional belief that a player's…
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…
Though athletics statistics are abundant, it is a difficult task to quantitatively compare performances from different events of track, field, and road running in a meaningful way. There are several commonly-used methods, but each has its…
In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
Two Beatty sequences are recorded by athletes running in opposite directions in a round stadium. This approach suggests a nice interpretation for well known partitioning criteria: such sequences (eventually) partition the integers…
We show that the great baseball players that started their careers before 1950 are overrepresented among rankings of baseball's all time greatest players. The year 1950 coincides with the decennial US Census that is closest to when Major…
The Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) problem is a very important problem in math- ematics, which has a broad application in scheduling problems, physics and bioinformatics. It is known that the given two random sequences of infinite…