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It has been noted that in many professional sports leagues a good predictor of a team's won-loss percentage is Bill James' Pythagorean Formula RSobs^c / (RSobs^c + RAobs^c), where RSobs (resp. RAobs) is the observed average number of runs…
Much of modern society is founded on orchestrating institutions that produce social goods by fostering motivated teams, pitting them against each other, and distributing the fruits of the arms races that ensue. However, even when the…
ONEAudit provides more efficient risk-limiting audits than other extant methods when the voting system cannot report a cast-vote record linked to each cast card. It obviates the need for re-scanning; it is simpler and more efficient than…
For a balanced cardcounting system we study the random variable of the true count after a number of cards are removed from the remaining deck and we prove a close formula for its standard deviation. As expected, the formula shows that the…
Chess and chance are seemingly strange bedfellows. Luck and/or randomness have no apparent role in move selection when the game is played at the highest levels. However, when competition is at the ultimate level, that of the World Chess…
We study the simple random walk on stochastic hyperbolic half planar triangulations constructed in Angel and Ray [3]. We show that almost surely the walker escapes the boundary of the map in positive speed and that the return probability to…
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…
We investigate the motion of a hard cylinder rolling down a soft inclined plane. The cylinder is subjected to a viscous drag force and stochastic fluctuations due to the surrounding medium. In a wide range of parameters we observe…
Many popular sports involve matches between two teams or players where each team have the possibility of scoring points throughout the match. While the overall match winner and result is interesting, it conveys little information about the…
We present the results of direct numerical simulations of heavy particle transport in homogeneous, isotropic, fully developed turbulence, up to resolution $512^3$ ($R_\lambda\approx 185$). Following the trajectories of up to 120 million…
In bandit with distribution shifts, one aims to automatically adapt to unknown changes in reward distribution, and restart exploration when necessary. While this problem has been studied for many years, a recent breakthrough of Auer et al.…
The "faster is slower" effect raises when crowded people push each other to escape through an exit during an emergency situation. As individuals push harder, a statistical slowing down in the evacuation time can be achieved. The slowing…
In sports analytics, home field advantage is a robust phenomenon where the home team wins more games than the away team. However, discovering the causal factors behind home field advantage presents unique challenges due to the…
Since Polyak's pioneering work, heavy ball (HB) momentum has been widely studied in minimization. However, its role in min-max games remains largely unexplored. As a key component of practical min-max algorithms like Adam, this gap limits…
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…
Large-scale spiral arms have been revealed in scattered light images of a few protoplanetary disks. Theoretical models suggest that such arms may be driven by and co-rotate with giant planets, which has called for remarkable observational…
This article puts forth a process applicable to central force scatterings. Under certain assumptions, we show that in attractive force fields a high speed particle with a small mass speeding through space, statistically loses energy by…
Driving safety has drawn much public attention in recent years due to the fast-growing number of cars. Smoking is one of the threats to driving safety but is often ignored by drivers. Existing works on smoking detection either work in…
Location-based games have come to the forefront of popularity in casual and mobile gaming over the past six years. However, there is no hard data on crimes that these games enable, ranging from assault to cyberstalking to grooming. Given…
In Major League Baseball, every ballpark is different, with different dimensions and climates. These differences make some ballparks more conducive to hitting home runs than others. Several factors conspire to make estimation of these…