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We revisit a foundational question in golf analytics: how important are the core components of performance--driving, approach play, and putting--in explaining success on the PGA Tour? Building on Mark Broadie's strokes gained analyses, we…
Do NFL teams make rational decisions? What factors potentially affect the probability of wining a game in NFL? How can a team come back from a demoralizing interception? In this study we begin by examining the hypothesis of rational…
We develop a statistical framework to evaluate evidence of alleged cheating involving illegal signaling in sports from a forensic perspective. We explain why, instead of a frequentist procedure, a Bayesian approach is called for. We apply…
Offside detection in soccer has emerged as one of the most important decisions with an average of 50 offside decisions every game. False detections and rash calls adversely affect game conditions and in many cases drastically change the…
Large-scale mobilization of individuals across social networks is becoming increasingly influential in society. However, little is known about what traits of recruiters and recruits and affect the speed at which one mobilizes the other.…
We propose and study a new model for competitions, specifically sports multi-player leagues where the initial strengths of the teams are independent i.i.d. random variables that evolve during different days of the league according to…
During the 2017 NBA playoffs, Celtics coach Brad Stevens was faced with a difficult decision when defending against the Cavaliers: "Do you double and risk giving up easy shots, or stay at home and do the best you can?" It's a tough call,…
We study a stochastic process that mimics single-game elimination tournaments. In our model, the outcome of each match is stochastic: the weaker player wins with upset probability q<=1/2, and the stronger player wins with probability 1-q.…
The complexity of the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm arises from the requirement of a likelihood evaluation for the full data set in each iteration. Payne and Mallick (2015) propose to speed up the algorithm by a delayed acceptance…
It is challenging to get access to datasets related to the physical performance of soccer players. The teams consider such information highly confidential, especially if it covers in-game performance.Hence, most of the analysis and…
We study biased {\em orientation games}, in which the board is the complete graph $K_n$, and Maker and Breaker take turns in directing previously undirected edges of $K_n$. At the end of the game, the obtained graph is a tournament. Maker…
I present a simple and transparent standard for career greatness in baseball: any major league player with H > 2500 or HR > 350 or K > 2800 or W > 240 makes my Hall of Fame Cut. Rate statistics are avoided due to small sample issues and to…
We estimate the effect of playing in one's home country in professional squash using a Bayesian hierarchical model applied to men's and women's Professional Squash Association matches from 2018-2024. The model incorporates players' world…
No matter how much some gamblers occasionally win, as long as they continue to gamble, sooner or later they will lose more to the casino, which is the so-called long bet will lose. Our results demonstrate the counter-intuitive phenomenon,…
In the random acceleration process a point particle moving in one dimension is accelerated by Gaussian white noise with zero mean. Although several fundamental statistical properties of the motion have been analyzed in detail, the…
Sports data analytics is a relevant topic in applied statistics that has been growing in importance in recent years. In basketball, a player or team has a hot hand when their performance during a match is better than expected or they are on…
We prove that a subtle but substantial bias exists in a common measure of the conditional dependence of present outcomes on streaks of past outcomes in sequential data. The magnitude of this streak selection bias generally decreases as the…
Handheld phone distraction is the leading cause of traffic accidents. However, few efforts have been devoted to detecting when the phone distraction happens, which is a critical input for taking immediate safety measures. This work proposes…
Forecasting sporting events encapsulate a compelling intellectual endeavor, underscored by the substantial financial activity of an estimated $80 billion wagered in global sports betting during 2022, a trend that grows yearly. Motivated by…
We study an example of a {\em hit-and-run} random walk on the symmetric group $\mathbf S_n$. Our starting point is the well understood {\em top-to-random} shuffle. In the hit-and-run version, at each {\em single step}, after picking the…