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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 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…
A popular quantitative approach to evaluating player performance in sports involves comparing an observed outcome to the expected outcome ignoring player involvement, which is estimated using statistical or machine learning methods. In…
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:…
"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…
Timeout control is a simple mechanism used when direct feedback is either impossible, unreliable, or too costly, as is often the case in distributed systems. Its effectiveness is determined by a timeout threshold parameter and our goal is…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
Restart -- interrupting a stochastic process followed by a new start -- is known to improve the mean time to its completion, and the general conditions under which such an improvement is achieved are now well understood. Here, we explore…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
The goal of the paper is to introduce a set of problems which we call mean field games of timing. We motivate the formulation by a dynamic model of bank run in a continuous-time setting. We briefly review the economic and game theoretic…
Effective teamwork is essential in structured, performance-driven environments, from professional organizations to high-stakes competitive settings. As tasks grow more complex, achieving high performance requires not only technical…
We present a simple game model where agents with different memory lengths compete for finite resources. We show by simulation and analytically that an instability exists at a critical memory length, and as a result, different memory lengths…
We analyze the time series of soccer matches in a model-free way using data for the German soccer league (Bundesliga). We argue that the goal difference is a better measure for the overall fitness of a team than the number of points. It is…
The moments of random variables are fundamental statistical measures for characterizing the shape of a probability distribution, encompassing metrics such as mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis. Additionally, the product moments,…
The National Football League (NFL) sets its regular season schedule to optimize viewership and minimize competitive inequities. One inequity assumed to impact team performance is rest differential, defined as the relative number of days…
This study evaluates the effectiveness of the two-for-one strategy in basketball by applying a causal inference framework to play-by-play data from the 2018-19 and 2021-22 National Basketball Association regular seasons. Incorporating…
As a baseball game progresses, batters appear to perform better the more times they face a particular pitcher. The apparent drop-off in pitcher performance from one time through the order to the next, known as the Time Through the Order…
When predictions support decisions they may influence the outcome they aim to predict. We call such predictions performative; the prediction influences the target. Performativity is a well-studied phenomenon in policy-making that has so far…
Team-based invasion sports such as football, basketball and hockey are similar in the sense that the players are able to move freely around the playing area; and that player and team performance cannot be fully analysed without considering…
Evaluating the individual movements for teammates in soccer players is crucial for assessing teamwork, scouting, and fan engagement. It has been said that players in a 90-min game do not have the ball for about 87 minutes on average.…