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Obtaining accepting lassos, witnesses and winning strategies in omega-automata and games with omega-regular winning conditions is an integral part of many formal methods commonly found in practice today. Despite the fact that in most…
Over the past century, basketball analytics has moved from simple box-score rates toward complex context-aware measures that evaluate events by their expected effect on game outcomes. Officiating analysis has not made the same transition:…
Batting average is one of the principle performance measures for an individual baseball player. It is natural to statistically model this as a binomial-variable proportion, with a given (observed) number of qualifying attempts (called…
A new approach in team sports analysis consists in studying positioning and movements of players during the game in relation to team performance. State of the art tracking systems produce spatio-temporal traces of players that have…
The presence of momentum in sports, where the outcome of a previous event affects a following event, is a belief often held by fans, and has been the subject of statistical study for many sports. This paper investigates the presence and…
Soccer is a sparse rewarding game: any smart or careless action in critical situations can change the result of the match. Therefore players, coaches, and scouts are all curious about the best action to be performed in critical situations,…
Numerous statistics have been proposed for the measure of offensive ability in major league baseball. While some of these measures may offer moderate predictive power in certain situations, it is unclear which simple offensive metrics are…
We formulate the head-to-head matchups between Major League Baseball pitchers and batters from 1954 to 2008 as a bipartite network of mutually-antagonistic interactions. We consider both the full network and single-season networks, which…
This paper reviews and compares popular methods, some old and some very recent, that produce time series having Poisson marginal distributions. The paper begins by narrating ways where time series with Poisson marginal distributions can be…
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…
Proof-of-Stake consensus protocols give rise to complex modeling challenges. We analyze the recently-updated Tezos Proof-of-Stake protocol and demonstrate that, under certain conditions, rational participants are incentivized to behave…
Each ballpark has a different size in baseball. It could be easily imagined that there would be many home runs in a small ballpark. Moreover, the environment of the ballpark, such as altitude, humidity, air pressure, and wind strength,…
This paper aims to revisit and expand upon previous work on the "hot hand" phenomenon in basketball, specifically in the NBA. Using larger, modern data sets, we test streakiness of shooting patterns and the presence of hot hand behavior in…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
Pace of play is an important characteristic in hockey as well as other team sports. We provide the first comprehensive study of pace within the sport of hockey, focusing on how teams and players impact pace in different regions of the ice,…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
Estimating ballpark effects and team defense in baseball is challenging because batted-ball outcomes are influenced by multiple factors, including contact quality, ballpark environment, defensive performance, and random variation. In this…
The factor of four increase in the LHC luminosity, from $0.5\times 10^{34}\,\textrm{cm}^{-2}\textrm{s}^{-1}$ to $2.0\times 10^{34}\textrm{cm}^{-2}\textrm{s}^{-1}$, and the corresponding increase in pile-up collisions during the 2015-2018…
During the last few sports seasons a lot of discussion has been generated for the several, high-profile, "comebacks" that were observed in almost all sports. The Cavaliers won the championship after being down 3-1 in the 2016 NBA finals'…
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…