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We propose a bandit algorithm that explores by randomizing its history of rewards. Specifically, it pulls the arm with the highest mean reward in a non-parametric bootstrap sample of its history with pseudo rewards. We design the pseudo…
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…
Bill James' Pythagorean formula has for decades done an excellent job estimating a baseball team's winning percentage from very little data: if the average runs scored and allowed are denoted respectively by ${\rm RS}$ and ${\rm RA}$, there…
We examine Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak and look at its likelihood, using a number of simple models. And it turns out that, contrary to many people's expectations, an extreme streak, while unlikely in any given year, is not…
Today's competition between the professional eSports teams is so strong that in-depth analysis of players' performance literally crucial for creating a powerful team. There are two main approaches to such an estimation: obtaining features…
Timeout is a short interruption during games used to communicate a change in strategy, to give the players a rest or to stop a negative flow in the game. Whatever the reason, coaches expect an improvement in their team's performance after a…
Motion sensors (e.g., accelerometers) on smartphones have been demonstrated to be a powerful side channel for attackers to spy on users' inputs on touchscreen. In this paper, we reveal another motion accelerometer-based attack which is…
Consider a coin tossing experiment which consists of tossing one of two coins at a time, according to a renewal process. The first coin is fair and the second has probability $1/2 + \theta$, $\theta \in [-1/2,1/2]$, $\theta$ unknown but…
Even though it might have taken some time, the three-point line ultimately changed the way the game is played as evidenced by the increase in the three-point shot attempts over the years. However, during the last few years we have…
We measure the variation of the escape speed of the Galaxy across a range of $\sim$ 40 kpc in Galactocentric radius. The local escape speed is found to be $521^{+46}_{-30}\,\mathrm{km\,s^{-1}}$, in good agreement with other studies. We find…
We investigated the temporal distribution of goals in soccer using event-level data from 3,433 matches across 21 leagues and competitions. Contrary to the prevailing notion of randomness, we found that the probability of a goal being scored…
Dynamic hysteresis, viz., delay in switching of a bistable system on account of the finite sweep rate of the drive has been extensively studied in dynamical and thermodynamic systems. Dynamic hysteresis results from slowing of the response…
We study the convergence behavior of the stochastic heavy-ball method with a small stepsize. Under a change of time scale, we approximate the discrete method by a stochastic differential equation that models small random perturbations of a…
In this work we completely characterize how the frequency with which each player participates in the game dynamics affects the possibility of reaching efficient states, i.e., states with an approximation ratio within a constant factor from…
We present a novel framework for predicting next actions in soccer possessions by leveraging path signatures to encode their complex spatio-temporal structure. Unlike existing approaches, we do not rely on fixed historical windows and…
In the pursuit of natural language understanding, there has been a long standing interest in tracking state changes throughout narratives. Impressive progress has been made in modeling the state of transaction-centric dialogues and…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
For an orientation $H$ with $n$ vertices, let $T(H)$ denote the maximum possible number of labeled copies of $H$ in an $n$-vertex tournament. It is easily seen that $T(H) \ge n!/2^{e(H)}$ as the latter is the expected number of such copies…
The cleanest way to discover a new particle is generally the "bump-hunt" methodology: looking for a localised excess in a mass (or related) distribution. However, if the mass of the particle being discovered is not known the procedure of…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…