Related papers: Bang the Can Slowly: An Investigation into the 201…

"The chance to win given a certain move" is an easily obtainable quantity from data and often quoted in gaming statistics. It is also the fundamental quantity that reinforcement learning AI bases on. Unfortunately, this conditional…

The speed-accuracy tradeoffs are prevalent in a wide range of physical systems. In this paper, we demonstrate speed-accuracy tradeoffs in the game of cricket, where 'batters' score runs on the balls bowled by the 'bowlers'. It is shown that…

The debate surrounding the hot hand in the NBA has been ongoing for many years. However, many of the previous works on this theme has focused on only the very next sequential shot attempt, often on very select players. This work looks in…

We find a remarkable agreement between the statistics of a randomly divided interval and the observed statistical patterns and distributions found in horse racing betting markets. We compare the distribution of implied winning odds, the…

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…

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…

Baseball is one of the few sports in which each team plays a game nearly everyday. For instance, in the baseball league in South Korea, namely the KBO (Korea Baseball Organization) league, every team has a game everyday except for Mondays.…

This paper develops a general framework for stochastic modeling of goals and other events in football (soccer) matches. The events are modelled as Cox processes (doubly stochastic Poisson processes) where the event intensities may depend on…

At the 2005 world championships there was considerable discussion and a formal protest in the long distance race arising from a perceived advantage obtained by some athletes running together. It is shown that a statistical model presented…

Basketball is often referred to as "a game of runs." We investigate the appropriateness of this claim using data from the full NBA 2016-17 season, comparing actual longest runs of scoring events to what long run theory predicts under the…

We investigate the hot hand phenomenon using data on 110,513 free throws taken in the National Basketball Association (NBA). As free throws occur at unevenly spaced time points within a game, we consider a state-space model formulated in…

In this paper, we present a novel sequential team selection model in soccer. Specifically, we model the stochastic process of player injury and unavailability using player-specific information learned from real-world soccer data.…

In some athletic races, such as cycling and types of speed skating races, athletes have to complete a relatively long distance at a high speed in the presence of direct opponents. To win such a race, athletes are motivated to hide behind…

It was widely reported in the media that, on 23 May 2009, at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City, Patricia DeMauro, playing craps for only the second time, rolled the dice for four hours and 18 minutes, finally sevening out at…

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…

We study best-arm identification in stochastic dueling bandits under the sole assumption that a Condorcet winner exists, i.e., an arm that wins each noisy pairwise comparison with probability at least $1/2$. We introduce a new…

Injuries are a major cost in sports. Teams spend millions of dollars every year on players who are hurt and unable to play, resulting in lost games, decreased fan interest and additional wages for replacement players. Modern convolutional…

More than a dozen young stars host spiral arms in their surrounding protoplanetary disks. The excitation mechanisms of such arms are under debate. The two leading hypotheses -- companion-disk interaction and gravitational instability (GI)…

In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…

In table tennis, the rotation (spin) of the ball plays a crucial role. A table tennis match will feature a variety of strokes. Each generates different amounts and types of spin. To develop a robot that can compete with a human player, the…